“Securing your Linux installation is something many
administrators do quite well, and you may be among the people who
have post-installation checklists to insure that your system is
locked down. However, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a
distribution that automatically installed a secure version of
Linux, and wouldn’t this be a great thing for inexperienced users
and administrators? Of course it would, and of course the Open
Source community has several projects underway to provide a secure
Linux Distribution.”
“The actual goals of the different projects are not all
identical, from removing potential vulnerabilities existing in
popular Linux distributions to creating an operating system that
builds in many forms of encryption. None of these projects seem to
have an overtly commercial goal of becoming a dominant Linux
distribution and challenging Red Hat, Caldera, Mandrake or SuSE.
They seem to be trying to fill a need to raise the bar for
operating system security, and the hope is that this research will
be absorbed back into major distributions. However, as the need for
tight security becomes more apparent among the masses, we believe a
totally secure Linux distribution to be a viable market opportunity
should the established players not see it.”
“The secure Linux projects discussed here are kha0S, Secure
Linux and Bastille Linux. Each represents a unique effort to push
the envelope of how security is built into Linux.”