Just wondering about HEADS.

[Madmogone]

HI all, I am enquiring whether anyone has tried or experience of the HEADS o/s, an alternative to TAILS o/s?. (I love the opposite name)I know it has the failings of the exit nodes of TAILS, but it is built with totally free software,in that all the code is there to be checked if needed and does not use propriety code at all.I look forward to any and all answers.Cheers.

[jimallyn]

I did some web searching. Apparently Heads is not a full OS, but rather a secure boot replacement for BIOS or UEFI. Interesting stuff:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/purism-n ... 9976.shtml

https://www.trmm.net/Heads

https://www.trmm.net/Heads_FAQ

http://osresearch.net/Installing-Heads

https://github.com/osresearch/heads/

https://www.trmm.net/Heads_threat_model


Some information on secure distros here:

https://lifehacker.com/linux-security-d ... 1658139404

[Fred Barclay]

@jimallyn I think that's a different project (also named "heads").
https://heads.dyne.org/

[jimallyn]

Thanks, Fred. I completely missed that in my searching.

[Madmogone]

Hi all,Thanks for the reply jimallyn, it certainly made interesting reading and probably confirms what a lot of people thought could be happening.Reading the articles made me think back to an experience I had about a couple of years ago.I was in the market for a firewall/router as I had been reading about companies not updating their software for their commercial of the shelf routers, so I thought ,right I would build my own machine and install a firewall o/s on it.I started looking around for parts on various sites looking at prices etc when I came across what I thought was the perfect machine, part built and just required ram and a ssd/hdd,and it already had four NIC,s installed. It was on the Amazon site, a lovely looking unit very similar to the new MINT machine, and the price was very competitive, so I decided to order one. Ten days later it arrived from CHINA. I installed my 8GB of ram and a 60GB mSATA unit. I loaded Smoothwall onto the unit and sat back to enjoy my increased security etc. I had a problem that one of the ethernet ports was not working correctly so I used a spare port as I only needed to use three ports for my setup. Then over a few days I noticed that there was a lot of port activity (lights flashing) when there should have been very little.This I thought of as strange and did not sit well with me.So I decided to send the unit back as there being a faulty NIC, I then built a new unit with a seperate mobo etc with the same specs.The new machine does not have the same amount of port activity as the Chinese unit had so I felt more relaxed. The point to this is that after reading all those articles it makes you wander whether something like this was happening with this unit, a firewall compromised by added electronics of one sort or another is a perfect way to snoop on you.It may just be me being paranoid, but it does make you wonder does it not?.On to the HEADS question, I know that it may not suit everyone as it only uses non propriety code so it may not support everyones hardware (wifi modules being one) but it sounds interesting and worth investigating, so I would like to hear of anyones experience of it. CHEERS.