COMP 3000 2011 Report: LPS

Background

This Distribution Report will be providing an analysis of the Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) operating system, which is developed and supplied by the Software Protection Initiative section of the United States Department of Defense (DoD).

LPS has been developed as an operating system to be used by government and military workers as a secure digital environment on systems that may not necessarily be secure. It has also been developed with a single use mentality. This means, there is no storage, and if the session becomes comprised due to malicious software, a simple reboot will produce a clean slate for the worker to use (Software Protection Initiative, 2011).

As of June 15th, 2011, LPS was approved by the Air Force Network Integration Center to access the Global Information Grid (GIG) for general telecommuting use (Software Protection Initiative, 2011). The GIG is described as a DoD system that includes any equipment, software, or service that transmits, stores, or processes DoD information, and provides any other associated services necessary to achieve information superiority (NSA, 2011).

The operating system has two variants, which can be obtained from the following locations:

Public ISO (137.3 MB Image) http://www.spi.dod.mil/docs/LPS-1.2.5_public.iso

Public Deluxe ISO (317.3 MB Image) http://www.spi.dod.mil/docs/LPS-1.2.5_public_deluxe.iso

Note: This report will be looking specifically at the Deluxe version of the distribution, which also provides Adobe Reader and Open Office.

The heritage of this operating system is not clearly documented anywhere, but based on the settings required for the Virtual Machine environment, it can be concluded that it is using a 2.6.x Linux kernel variant.

Installation and Startup

System Requirements

• A computer system with an x86 processor
• 512 MB of RAM (LPS-Public), 1 GB RAM (LPS-Public Deluxe)
• Wired, Wifi, or broadband cellular Ethernet (DHCP highly recommended)
• Ability to boot from either USB or CD-ROM (LPS is available on either media)
• CCID-compliant USB smart card reader (SCR 331 w/current firmware [>5.22])

Although LPS is meant to be used as a live boot distribution, for the purposes of this report and testing, VMPlayer 4.0 was used as the operating environment.

Installation was simple and straightforward. When setting up the VMWare Virtual Machine, VMWare Player was unable to detect the operating system automatically, so the Linux option “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel 64-bit version” was chosen.

Default settings were kept for the rest of the configuration, with the exception of customizing the virtual machine hardware memory. This value was changed from the default 384 MB, to 1024 MB, as per meeting the distribution system requirements.

Booting of the distribution took roughly one minute from start to the license agreement screen. Upon accepting the agreement, the desktop loaded almost instantly.

Basic Operation

With my configuration, there was 678.5 MB of free space left to be used.

Upon first viewing the distribution's desktop, the first thing that is noticeable is the striking similarity in appearance to a Windows operating system. There is a start menu, but instead of a Windows logo, the user will find Tux there. There are also Windows Show Desktop and command prompt icons. Show Desktop performs as expected, but the command prompt icon launches Xterm.