Security researchers have stripped down the North Korean-built Red Star OS, an operating system based on Linux and designed for use in the communist country.

The researchers, Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess from German tech security firm ERNW Enno Rey Netzwerke GmbH, found that the OS incorporates a number of features aimed at spying on the country’s computer literate citizens.

According to them, Red Star OS works in much the same fashion as the totalitarian North Korean regime itself. The OS is a fairly basic one, is totally controlled by its creators, even though its somewhat ironically based on Fedora 11, an open-source operating system that’s all about privacy and free speech.

Grunow and Schiess said they managed to get hold of the 2013 version of Red Star OS, saying they downloaded it from a website outside of North Korea, without providing the source.

The development of Red Star OS was apparently initiated by Kim Jong-Il, the deceased former leader and father of current North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. Kim Jong-Il is said to have demanded North Korea’s technologists build their own operating system in order to reduce the reliance on foreign made software, and eliminate the threat of “backdoors” that might allow its enemies to spy on it. Red Star OS is therefore designed to work with the North Korean Intranet, a closed network that runs from servers inside the country which only allows access to a limited number of approved websites.

One of the most striking ‘security features’ of Red Star OS is that it’s able to track any changes made to the operating system, most likely to watch for any backdoors that foreign agencies might try to implant in it, said Grunow and Schiess.

“They may want to be independent of other operating systems because they fear back doors,” Grunow said in an interview with The Guardian.

A second, more foreboding ‘security feature’ of Red Star OS is that it places covert watermarks on any file that’s stored on the computer, and on any files kept on a USB that’s plugged into it.

“It’s done stealthily and touches files you haven’t even opened,” Grunow said. According to the researchers, the idea is that authorities will be able to trace the distributors of any illegal content, such as South Korean TV shows or movies, that are smuggled into the country on USBs.

Red Star OS is also surprisingly resistant to being tampered with, too. If a user tries to alter the system settings, for example to try and disable the covert watermarking or the antivirus or firewall, the OS blocks it by automatically rebooting itself.

One thing the researchers didn’t find however, was any evidence to suggest Red Star OS might have been used to carry out cyberattacks against foreign nations. North Korea has been accused of conducting several attacks against foreign countries and corporations in recent years, most notably the infamous Sony Corp. hack back in 2014. We don’t know for certain if North Korea was responsible for that attack and others, but if it is, it’s unlikely the attacking computers were running Red Star OS.

For those who might be interested to try out Red Star OS for themselves, we managed to find this link that purports to offer a free download of Red Star OS 3.0. We haven’t verified if the download is genuine or not, so continue at your own risk!

Image credit: 589724 via pixabay.com