this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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I question the legitimacy of Kicksecure because they have some strange design choices from their About page, but I digress. I understand that's not your main concern at this time.
Do you have a non-USB 3 drive available? I've seen some firmware have issues with the newer standards. Have you tried different ports?
omg pls do digress! like i said, im reallly open to other distros.
did try other ports.
dont have another usb. i like this one cuz its fast and i dont want to buy a new one before being sure it will work.
As someone who does do a lot of embedded work professionally, including custom kernel development and security research, I don't think the developers of the distro really understand what they wish to accomplish. They don't understand the technologies they are working with and how it fits into a good security posture. Let me cherry pick some examples from their website:
Routing your upgrades through Tor seems really silly to me. Your packages are already authenticated using strong cryptography, and if you're concerned about Debian core repositories signing packages with their keys just to target you in particular, use a mirror. There's plenty of them. Debian maintainers won't know what you're downloading, and if you fear the maintainers as part of your threat model, then perhaps a Debian-based distribution that implicitly trusts those maintainers is the wrong choice.
Okay... that seems rather contrived. They don't cite any sources, and I've never heard of this being a security concern.
Woah, "better" encryption! That's a pretty extreme claim without establishing that there's anything wrong with how Linux already generates random numbers, which has been extensively studied and attacked. I'd be way more shy of their tweaks introducing security bugs. Do not get creative with cryptography.
I can't take their work seriously, I'm sorry. It sounds like a lot of hope and not a whole lot of experience.
Seems to be related to this: https://github.com/Kicksecure/tirdad
Although it looks like it's literally just slightly possible to leak the load on the system. It's hard to pull off, and isn't precise enough to leak anything important.