Tor-ramdisk 20140925 released

I’ve been blogging about my non-Gentoo work using my drupal site at http://opensource.dyc.edu/  but since I may be loosing that server sometime in the future, I’m going to start duplicating those posts here.  This work should be of interest to readers of Planet Gentoo because it draws a lot from Gentoo, but it doesn’t exactly fall under the category of a “Gentoo Project.”

Anyhow, today I’m releasing tor-ramdisk 20140925.  As you may recall from a previous post, tor-ramdisk is a uClibc-based micro Linux distribution I maintain whose only purpose is to host a Tor server in an environment that maximizes security and privacy.  Security is enhanced using Gentoo’s hardened toolchain and kernel, while privacy is enhanced by forcing logging to be off at all levels.  Also, tor-ramdisk runs in RAM, so no information survives a reboot, except for the configuration file and the private RSA key, which may be exported/imported by FTP or SCP.

A few days ago, the Tor team released 0.2.4.24 with one major bug fix according to their ChangeLog. Clients were apparently sending the wrong address for their chosen rendezvous points for hidden services, which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it did because they also sent the identity digest. This fix should improve surfing of hidden services. The other minor changes involved updating geoip information and the address of a v3 directory authority, gabelmoo.

I took this opportunity to also update busybox to version 1.22.1, openssl to 1.0.1i, and the kernel to 3.16.3 + Gentoo’s hardened-patches-3.16.3-1.extras. Both the x86 and x86_64 images were tested using node “simba” and showed no issues.

You can get tor-ramdisk from the following urls (at least for now!)

i686:
Homepage: http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-ramdisk
Download: http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-ramdisk-downloads

x86_64:
Homepage: http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-x86_64-ramdisk
Download: http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-x86_64-ramdisk-downloads

 

4 thoughts on “Tor-ramdisk 20140925 released”

  1. Hello,
    I don’t remember having heard of this micro distribution before. It sounds very interesting. I hope to still find it maintained when I’ll finally take time to start to use Tor. Nice job!

    1. I have been maintaining it since 2008. I don’t think its going anywhere. Its pretty mature. There’s only two things on the TODO list: 1) I need to allow sftp to different ports than 22. 2) I need to consider switching back to static executables using musl instead of uClibc. This may make the image smaller.

  2. Hi,
    Interesting. As u mention a possible future aim to slim down final size, could we have the current numbers in this repect?
    Thks

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