North Korea’s Operating System Secretly Spies on You

We all know North Korea has one of the most oppressive political systems in the world. Having a communist regime, the country and its leaders are paranoid about pretty much everything. This article is solely dedicated to their Red Star OS, an operating system developed for people living in a government-controlled system.

Two German researchers, Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess, working at the German IT security company ERNW GmbH, have been analyzing the code of the Red Star OS version 3.0 since the past month. They presented the OS, released online anonymously around a year ago, at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, a meeting for security researchers and hackers. Their findings are troubling, considering that the internet is designed for free speech and expression.

Based on the Linux distribution Fedora, the latest version (3.0) was developed in 2013. As many probably know, Linux systems have the same look and feel as that of Apple’s OS, not surprising considering that Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, has taken pictures with Macs just like his Father.

There are many features present in the Red Star OS which are similar to the Macintosh OS. It also includes a Korean word processor, a calendar app, and one similar to Garageband for music.

In North Korea, a country where free internet is not available, rich media like movies, music and written content is transferred from person-to-person through USB drives and microSD cards. This makes it hard to track the original uploader of the file. The Red Star OS tackles this issue in an elusive manner. Hidden code in the OS watermarks each and every file and identifies it with the user who first introduced that file into any Red Star OS.

This implies that any file opened in the Red Star OS is automatically associated with an identity. Thus, the government can track down the user who has opened or created the file, along with the subsequent chain of transfers, if any.

"It's definitely privacy invading, it's not transparent to the user. It's done stealthily, and touches files you haven't even opened," Grunow said.

The OS also deletes undesired files without permission. Antivirus software and firewalls protect the user from any attacks, foreign or domestic. Web browsers are designed to access internal servers only. Encryption for the files is purely custom-built. This might be due to the threat of any backdoors. Also, if the system detects tampering with system files, the consequences might be dire. The system shows an error and immediately reboots.

North Korea’s OS, in development since 2012, is not the only ‘foreign’ operating system developed by ‘secretive’ nations. Cuba, Russia and China have made attempts at custom operating systems.