Niklaus and me had the chance to talk about our research on RedStar OS on the
32nd Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg this year. You can see the talk
online at
media.ccc.de
or on Youtube.
We talked about the details of the watermarking mechanism that
we found in July
and additional features of RedStar OS like it’s “Virus Scanner” and the system
architecture. During the days after our talk we were able to find watermarks
applied by RedStar OS in the wild on some sites on the Internet. We can confirm
at least 7 different instances of RedStar OS that have applied watermarks to
JPGs. Cleaning up the data is work in progress and we will get back to you with
the results! Niklaus has put our presentation and additional resources in the
git. Feel free to join us in our
research and make the world a safer place!
During the last few months information about one of North Koreas operating
systems was leaked. It is a Linux based OS that tries to simulate the look and
feel of a Mac. Some of it’s features have already been discussed on
variousblogposts and news
articles.
We thought we would take a short look at the OS. This blog post contains some of
the results.
As you can imagine, most interesting for us was to investigate features that
impact the privacy of the users. There are some
publications concerning the security
of the OS, this is an aspect that we will not cover in this post. We will stick
to a privacy issue that we identified in this post. As ERNW has a long history
of “Making the World a Safer Place”, we consider this topic an important one.
The privacy of potential users (especially from North Korea) may be impacted and
therefore we think that the results must be made available for the public. So,
here we go …