Anyone got any thoughts on the Russian Linux Distros ? Astra Linux for example is described as a distro developed for the Russian military and security forces etc and provides data protection to the level classified top secret by the Russian defence ministry. Available in Russian and English.
The secure Smolensk edition is NOT free. The Oryol edition is available for download. On Russian Internet forums, they recommend Runtu for home users. Astra has a lightweight desktop GUI.
Imagine a NSA piece of software with millions of lines of code. Sure, they can make this software protect them against all exploits, but they may chose to put flaws into this software that will jeopardize the security of, say, one of their adversaries.
Installed Astra common edition in a VM. It comes with PaX kernel but it is not default in grub and from what I can find on their website it seems to contain only part of PaX. Firefox is at 52.0.2 and Thunderbird 45.8.0, so behind on security updates and that is after installing all available updates. Browsed their website somewhat with Google Translate, it seems to have some interesting security features but they don't go in much detail and most is not applicable to end users. The website is only reachable over HTTP and there are no gpg signatures to verify the downloads.
Oh yes, I agree with you on that point, I thought you were talking about the Russian distros specifically.
Yes I'm sure they all do it but if you live in the west it really doesn't matter if the Russian government is the one that knows you are a political activist that's organising demonstrations or trying to start a minimum wage workers union where as you might not want your own government to know so much about that.
