CHAOS - distributed hacking

Pure Hacking hosts a new Linux distribution. While that’s not very newsworthy in itself, this distribution is the smallest I’ve ever heard of and it has a very useful twist.

CHAOS is a tiny (6Mbyte) Linux distribution, that will boot any 586/Pentium (or better) computer into a working openMosix node, without disturbing (or even touching) the contents of the local hard disk.

CHAOS aims to be the fastest, most compact, secure and straight-forward openMosix cluster platform available.

The creator of CHAOS needed a way to similate a hacker going to work on a password file. A hacker would have a couple of months to crack the file but security companies need to be able to show clients in a live demonstration how easy their system is to crack. This is now going to be accomplished by running CHAOS on many office computers during non-working hours. The bootable CD allows the computational program to run without any access to the hard drive.

6MB linux distro? That’s really cool.