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Comment by astine | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't specify what distinguishes this from a regular liveCD Linux distro. My guess is that the DoD has hardened the included kernel (possibly included SELinux) and curated the included packages for security, but article doesn't say. It also doesn't specify what if any special configurations it has made to the standard included packages to make this more secure.

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One thing that distinguishes it, from the article, is that it doesn't mount the machine's hard drive.

Anyone can do essentially what they're doing just by using a live CD. They've gone a bit beyond that by not mounting the hard drive as noted, and whatever other changes they've made that the article doesn't specify.

Most LiveCDs don't mount hard drives unless you specifically tell it to do so, for example, by clicking on the drive icon. Perhaps this distro disables even that capability, so you can't leave any trace on the machine even if someone got you to run the latest Firefox exploit.

correct. I played with this for a while and couldn't find a way to mount. You're booted in as a non-root user and don't know the root password. There's all sorts of stuff you can't do with this. I this may be primarily being developed as a counter-intel tool.

This distribution has stripped hard disk support from the kernel. It is intended as a relatively more secure browsing platform (with support for DoD two-factor authentication for email access, etc.). I provide it to my parents for browsing the web, and my tech support calls from home are gone.

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