North Korea is a peculiar country in many respects that we will not discuss here, but one of the things that makes it special is that it has its own state operating system. RedStar OS is an operating system developed exclusively by and for North Korea based on Linux. The North Korean OS is based on Fedora 11 and offers a version of Mozilla Firefox (Naenara), modified to navigate the North Korean intranet. It also includes other programs such as a text editor, an email client, video and audio player, video games, and WINE to use Windows programs.
RedStar OS closely monitors what each user does. Specifically, it creates “watermarks” on documents on any USB that connects to the computer. What the operating system does is read these documents, photos or videos and modify them to include the serial number of the USB memory in which they are located. It is not the first time that people have talked about how this operating system “marks” all files. Florian himself also explained it a few months ago and demonstrated it with an example.
But why do they do this? To know who has this file, who created it and who opened it “, assures one of those responsible for the investigation to Motherboard. The” marks “make it possible to monitor in detail any file that is distributed via USB or microSD cards, two methods used in the country to share documents whose possession is illegal.
On the security side, Red Star OS has a pre-installed firewall, its own antivirus system and a program that continuously scans the computer to detect any changes made to the files. Any change that the user can – or manages – to make to the system ends with an error message appearing on the screen and the device restarting to return to its original state.
In North Korea, access to the WWW is not free and only government officials and foreigners who have permission can access it. For the rest of the users the state intranet is available: Kwangmyong. This intranet contains state-owned media and some sites that have been pre-approved by the government.
Thanks to the “copy” of Firefox they use, Naenara, we can verify that all North Korean addresses are within the 10.0.0.0 address range, a range reserved by the rest of the world only for private internal networks. In this way routing to and from North Korea is impossible.
See also:
OpenWall Linux distro focused on server security
Whonix – A distro for security lovers
