Security distribution

Under the Radar

Article from Issue 199/2017

Author(s): Erik Bärwaldt

Internet users can fly under the radar of hackers and data collectors with Discreete Linux.

Banning uninvited guests from your computer these days can mean negotiating several obstacles. Leaks have revealed many of the sophisticated technical methods deployed by the intelligence services. Additionally, industrial spies and criminal hackers spare no effort to spy on users. The attackers now rely not only on software vulnerabilities but also on manipulated hardware, which poses problems for special occupational groups that rely on discretion – such as journalists, lawyers, or doctors.

Discreete Linux [1] seeks to put a stop to intrusion attempts. The former Ubuntu Privacy Remix [2] now uses Debian 8 as its basis and is available as a beta version. In this article, we take an in-depth look at the updated edition.

Hardened

The system is available as 1.6GB hybrid image [3]. You can launch and run this on a USB stick or an optical medium. Discreete Linux lacks a persistence mode that lets you store your own files on USB flash drives. The system only boots on read-only ISO 9660 filesystems and creates a temporary overlay filesystem to avoid loading malicious software unnoticed in the background.

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