(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

a nephew of mine works for the pentagon. He sets up networks. They sent out email to their employees telling them for online banking, use Mac or Ubuntu. how does Puppy fit in this scenario?

"If you are using the internet for a commercial transaction, use a Linux boot up disk - such as Ubuntu or some of the other flavours. Puppylinux is a nice small distribution that boots up fairly quickly. It gives you an operating system which is perfectly clean and operates only in the memory of the computer and is a perfectly safe way of doing internet banking."
Detective Inspector Bruce van der Graaf from the Computer Crime Investigation Unit

Use this secure banking print out
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 045#353045

thanks, i really like the distro.
i use it primarily.

Lobster,
Is there any security advantage to using Puppy within windows for online transactions? Thanks.

If possible put a Puppy CD into your Windows powered PC. Boot up with puppy pfix=ram

setup firewall (with wizard)
Then connect to the net - do your transacting and shut down the computer.

I would suggest that is better than some military grade security.

I am also aware - forget who is doing it - that one of our puppys is setting up Puppy Linux for online banking.

See this at post #237 of my Puppy Linux thread.

Lots of other goodies in my Puppy Linux thread.
Begin here at the bottom of page 10, and work backwards toward the beginning.

sfl7fl wrote:a nephew of mine works for the pentagon. He sets up networks. They sent out email to their employees telling them for online banking, use Mac or Ubuntu. how does Puppy fit in this scenario?

The same way Ubuntu does: it's a Linux system. The point I see to the memo is "To be really secure, don't use Windows".

Online banking sessions use https, creating an encrypted session between you and the financial institution. The problem is that Windows is vulnerable to trojans like keystroke loggers that can capture the information that you enter before it is encrypted and sent and phone home. Such things don't exist for Mac OS/X or Linux.

I do banking from Windows, but with layered defenses: Windows is kept fully patched via auto-update, I don't use IE (Firefox here, but SeaMonkey, Opera, Chrome, and Safari are alternatives), I have current A/V with regularly updated signatures, I run a firewall (two, in fact), and I use NoScript in Firefox to turn of scripting for sites that aren't in a whitelist. I also prefer not to do banking using wifi in public hotspots. It can wait till I'm at home behind my router using WPA2 security.

You should be able to do banking from Puppy - the issue will be a supported browser. Your bank may want support for stuff an older browser won't do, and experimentation is required. Puppy ships with a SeaMonkey 1.1 version. Try it and see if it works. If not, other things including SeaMonkey 2, Firefox, Opera 10, and Google Chrome are available.
______
Dennis

what 2 firewalls?

I use Puppy for banking.
I have it effectively on a USB stick with a physical read-only switch so it boots quickly. Very few USB sticks have switches, so I have resorted to a SDHC card + USB adapter. A small class 10 SDHC card absolutely flies.
The card should never be written to after the operating system is connected to the internet. I like the fact that if the running form does get penetrated the next reboot is clean.

It might be advisable to download a version of Puppy on a trusted operating environment. write it to read only media and then verify its signature on a third system. I also wait for a couple of months and check the downloaded version has not revealed any unintentional freeloaders. Am I paranoid or what

rumex wrote:I have resorted to a SDHC card + USB adapter. A small class 10 SDHC card absolutely flies. The card should never be written to after the operating system is connected to the internet. I like the fact that if the running form does get penetrated the next reboot is clean.

.... Am I paranoid or what

That is how I do it. I also set the write switch to "off" on the SD card so the original OS never changes. If you also have installed Puppy user files on the PC's drives, you need to set pfix=ram or it will boot off those files. The above links, probably discuss how you can configure the memory stick copy of Puppy to automatically do that.

Booting off CD or memory stick is probably as safe as you can be if the first browser action is for banking. For browsing dodgy sites, it's probably safe too, but being as paranoid as rumex, I would boot off a PC with no drives if I wanted to do that.