On Sunday at Chaos Communication Congress, a security, art, and politics conference held annually in Hamburg, Germany, researchers Niklaus Schiess and Florian Grunow presented their in-depth investigation of the third version of the operating system. “This is a full blown operation system where they control most of the code,” said Grunow. Regardless, “It shows they didn't even want to rely on foreign crypto,” Grunow said. While private computer use is on the rise in North Korea, visitors to the country say most computers still use Windows XP, now nearly 15 years old. The purpose “is to track who actually has this file, who created this file, and who opened this file,” Schiess said. “It really looks like they’ve just tried to build an operating system for them, and give the user a basic set of applications,” says Grunow. And, for North Korea, that purpose is creating an operating system that can be used to spy on the citizenry.
– Check out North Korea's computer operating system, and it feels almost like you're using a Mac. Red Star OS is a "fully featured desktop system," German researcher Niklaus Schiess tells Motherboard, complete with word processing software and a revamped Firefox browser. But like almost everything else in the totalitarian nation, something more nefarious lies underneath, per Schiess and Florian Grunow, who both scrutinized a version of the Linux-based OS that was leaked in 2014. They presented their findings Sunday to the Chaos Communication Congress—what Reuters calls "a gathering of hackers and security researchers"—in Hamburg, Germany. "We found that the features implemented in Red Star OS are the wet dream of a surveillance state dictator," the two say, describing a "fear-driven" OS that features "malicious functionality." Among the features of the OS are custom-developed encryption and the watermarking of documents and multimedia files so they can be tracked as they're transferred from computer to computer via USB sticks, Reuters notes. "It's definitely privacy invading, it's not transparent to the user," Grunow says, per the news agency. It "touches files you haven't even opened." There's also a built-in firewall, anti-virus scanner, and a program that reboots the OS or displays an error message if anyone tries to mess with the OS, per Motherboard. What made the OS particularly interesting to Grunow and Schiess is the fact that the nation is using the open source Linux OS, which can be customized for a user's particular purposes—in North Korea's case, snooping on its own, per Re/code. "North Korea abuses the principals of free software to provide an operating system that suppresses free speech," the researchers note in their CCC abstract.