History

In early 2008, Robbins proposed to resolve the Gentoo Foundation problems.^[3][4] But he had left the project in 2004, and his offer was refused.^[5] The Funtoo project was born as an initiative to implement his vision, with aims to share innovations.^[6]

Core technologies

Funtoo features in addition to native UTF-8 by default include:

Design goal

The central design consideration in Tin Hat is to construct an operating system that can hide data from an attacker even if he has physical access to the computer.^[17] Physical access to a computer with unencrypted filesystems does not secure the data and an attacker could easily retrieve the data. Encrypting the filesystem provides protection from such an attack, but many implementations of encryption do not hide the fact that data is encrypted on the filesystem. For example, the LUKS encryption system includes metadata which detail the block cipher and block cipher mode used in encryption. This information does not help the attacker decrypt the filesystem, but it does reveal that it contains encrypted data and not random data. However, Tin Hat stores its filesystem in the RAM, leaving no data in the computer's hard drive. If the user stores any data via a more permanent means than RAM, the encrypted data is indiscernible from random data.

Tin Hat's preferred method of encryption is via loop-aes v3.

Beyond these considerations, Tin Hat has to also protect against more common exploits based on networking or security holes in software. The hardening model chosen is PaX/Grsecurity which is already provided by the Hardened Gentoo project. Hardening of the kernel and the toolchain make most code born exploits less likely. A non-modular compiled kernel further frustrates the insertion of malicious kernel modules.^[18]

History

As of December 3, 2009, VLOS has been rebuilt with Daniel Robbins' fork of Gentoo Linux called Funtoo.^[19]

Versions

Vidalinux comes in two different flavors; one can be downloaded, while the other must be purchased. While the downloaded version technically has all the same software packages as the purchased version, the difference is that the purchased version (which can be bought for 25 USD) contains many binaries of often used programs, while the downloaded version forces the user to download ebuilds of these packages and build the binaries themselves, which requires more time.

Version History

• 1.0 October 4, 2004
• 1.1 December 20, 2004
• 1.2 August 1, 2005
• 1.2.1 January 18, 2006
• 1.2.1-r2 January 30, 2006
• 1.3 18 October 2006