Suicide Linux (2009) • Hacker News Board

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#31

Post by segfaultbuserr » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #25

katsume3 wrote: post #5

Interesting. It annoys me when hackers tend to do something 'creative' once they're in. Instead of recursively deleting everything (which has the most impact) - they try some novel and boring task which has low impact. The end goal of all nefarious forms of hacking should be to wipe everything.

Viruses in the 80s used to wipe everything or do something very visible with the screen. They got more creative in the 90s, especially after many people got an internet connection at work or at home.

> Viruses in the 80s used to wipe everything

Not all viruses do it intentionally, some are originally rather harmless but has unfortunate side-effects in its replication code. For example, when you use a floppy disk in a different format, the virus tries to overwrite it anyway...

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#32

Post by outworlder » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #27

> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…

Some of these design decisions precisely emulate the thought process of some 'architects' (never understood why that word was used for software) that I've worked with. They'd call some of these 'being resilient'.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#33

Post by Minor49er » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #27

> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…

That's a bit extreme. You should at least allow some error messages. Though those ones should just say "Oops, something went wrong :)"

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#34

Post by outworlder » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

mariopt wrote: post #10

A confirmation message would be really helpful instead of losing all my stuff.

Why would you run this in an actual machine? VMs are cheap.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#35

Post by alex_young » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

There used to be a few DOS shells which would do less than helpful stuff to you. One I liked would just offer insults instead of whatever it was you were attempting to do.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#36

Post by salgernon » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

I seem to recall[1] that at one point, that emacs had a "final score" mode that would tell you how many typos / corrections you'd made during an editing session... Not as destructive as an 'rm -rf', but it would provide incentive to minimize mistakes.

[1] Or I may not recall; it was a strange time. It might have been a suggestion, along the lines of designing a grep stick for physical libraries.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#37

Post by segfaultbuserr » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

HashingtheCode wrote: post #29

This could be turned into a really great security tool, akin to a deadman switch, which upon activation and incorrect use, deletes the contents of the users home directory. Example. In Mate Desktop. the default terminal is Mate Terminal. Upon installation of Suicide Linux, Mate Terminal could be modified to delete the users home, but provide no warning that it is running. For the user, they could use another terminal…

In this case, just "rm" everything is far from enough, it needs to be a secure deletion. And the best way to implement secure deletion is using full disk encryption, this way, instead of wiping the entire disk, you just need to wipe the header, which contains its master key.

    head -c 100000000 /dev/zero > /dev/sdX1; sync

An even better solution is interfacing the motherboard with a small microcontroller and storing the master key in hardware (and possibly with a key-split algorithm, so compromising the hardware doesn't reveal the key, but its destruction will kill the key), such as a battery-backed SRAM or a hardware crypto chip. The self-destruction command would be an I/O request to wipe the chip. Tamper-switches can be placed at strategic physical locations around the machine.

You can also write a deamon to monitor USB devices and trigger the self-destruction when an unknown device is detected, e.g. If your machine has been seized on-the-fly, the attacker is likely to plug an anti-screenlock USB mouse emulator, which triggers its self-destruction.

The tricky part is balancing the degree of security protection and the risk of data destruction from a false-positive trigger...

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#38

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

Minor49er wrote: post #33

dkarl wrote: post #27

> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…

That's a bit extreme. You should at least allow some error messages. Though those ones should just say "Oops, something went wrong :)"

[deleted]

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#39

Post by laurent92 » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #27

> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…

That looks like a cmd.exe emulator. Just replace / with \ so it gets confused with escaping sequences.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#40

Post by aprdm » Thu, Oct 01, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #27

> Perhaps rm -rf / should be replaced with something with more verbose flags set. That way, when you run a bad command, you are told immediately that things are being deleted This gives me an idea: Hell Linux. In Hell Linux, the operating system does its best to pretend that nothing is wrong, so it takes you as long as possible to realize that you've made a mistake. Commands ignore all unrecognized flags. In shell sc…

Gosh this gave me the chills. I am afraid some people are that creative to cause chaos!