- North Korea’s proprietary operating system marks and tracks all files that … – Dagbladet.no

(Dagbladet): It looks like any other operating system, but works definitely different.

This is the conclusion to the data experts Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess in the German IT company ERNW North Korea egenutvklide operating system “Red Star”.

Paranoid operating system

During a conference in Hamburg in Germany this week, got the audience a description of how North Korea’s operating system works in practice by the two experts over longer have analyzed the coding system is built on.

And the conclusion is perhaps not very surprising: North Korea’s operating system is as paranoid as the state itself.

The news agency Reuters in an article that is reprinted in its entirety in the British newspaper The Guardian.

Selects all files

In a State where everything you see and hear tentatively being controlled, is perhaps the most sensational, a Norwegian perspective, North Korea makes absolutely all files that go into the computer, according to the two experts.

In this way the country the opportunity to track every file being connected computers.

– It is clearly a violation of privacy. It is not visible to the user. It is made hidden and limits files you do not even have opened, said Grunow.

And it is done according to Reuters as a result of North Korea’s growing underground market for foreign film and music. This is distributed via USB sticks and are traditionally difficult to trace. Now therefore be possible for the authorities of the dictator-state to do.

Fearing foreign intelligence

– This is an operating system where they control most of the code itself, said Grunow during the conference.

The reason for this, told the experts who examined the operating system, is that North Korea fears that their system can easily be hacked by foreign intelligence agencies.

– It is perhaps driven by fear. They want to be independent from other operating systems because they fear that it might be a backdoor into the system, he said further.

Intranet, not the Internet

North Korea’s intranet is not connected to the world internet. It therefore allows only access to state media and some approved sites.

For over a decade they have developed their own operating system at the request of the deceased dictator Kim Jong-il, father of the current dictator Kim Jong-un. The latest version should have been designed in 2013, and is based on the open system Linux. How many computers in North Korea who use the system, and are connected to the intranet, is not known.