Staying out of sight with Anonym.OS

An interesting open source “live” CD called Anonym.OS v1.0 has been released by kaos.theory security research. It is interesting because …

… it is intended to provide secure anonymous Internet access for naïve end users. As outlined in the developer’s presentation the techniques used to create Anonym.OS were: 1. Host Hardening 2. Strong Ingress Filtering 3. Strong Egress Filtering 4. Content-Filtering Proxies 5. Anonymizing Proxies 6. Encrypted Protocols Anonym.OS is based on OpenBSD 3.8 and masquerades as a Windows XP SP1 as far as any system it contacts is concerned. It uses a variety of other techniques of which the most interesting is that it is secure from active intrusion because it is locked down and hardened. Each component of Anonym.OS is configured and optimized for maximum anonymity and as a consequence any program that could use automatic update won’t. An otherwise moderately enthusiastic article on Ars Technica criticizes the system for sluggish performance and more roundly, for adopting a “one size fits all” approach and offering no alternate configurations or configurability. Also see Wired’s article on AnonymOS. In theory you can download Anonym.OS from Sourceforge but it seems like the mirrors are yet to get synchronized or they are overloaded. Your best bet is to use BitTorrent and find the Anonym.OS torrent on LinuxTracker.