I need something that would be ideal for a pre-configured torrent seed box, or secure browsing out-of-the-box. A Live medium environment with these features is preferred, and security features such as kernel hardening would be nice, but offensive or anonymity elements are not needed.

Hi EntangledTux,

Welcome!

By 'out-of-the-box' do you mean 'installed by default'? I don't think you're going to find what you are looking for with any distro. You're just going to have to break down and install some packages. The next thing is 'secure browsing' but not necessarily 'anonymous' browsing. Is this some new definition of 'secure browsing' I hadn't previously been aware of?

Finally, live systems suck for running a real system. They're only good for portability. USB flash drives are one of the slowest and least reliable forms of storage, although the alternative--optical disks--are even slower.

Yes, multiple browsers installed by default, available in the live environment would be a huge help. When I say secure, I was referring to some features like CentOS's implementation of SELinux, or other hardening and mitigations in the kernel. After it's installed I could worry about the torrenting and seeding.

I'm using Tails and it's secure and has anonymity features, but I don't need those, but rather support for downloading and sharing torrents for linux distributions. If Tails could do that it would be fine.

Another way of looking at it would be something like Tails, but made for web broswing, torrenting and serving instead of using anonymity for everything, and made for more than just a live environment. That part is still important though.

If you pick a distro that uses KDE, you are likely to get two browsers, Konqueror and Firefox. Depending on how much of the KDE suite is included, you may also get the Ktorrent application, which works very nicely.

Such distros include OpenSUSE, Mageia, Kubuntu, and Slackware, but Slackware does not offer a Live CD (though their are Live CDs based on Slackware).

Just a stray thought.

if running live is not your primary concern, why can't you just tweak & install what you need?
i don't get it.
it doesn't have to be preinstalled.

just make up your own mind:
https://distrowatch.com/search.php
if what you want exactly is not available, you can always make it yourself.

looks like it's time for this poem again:
http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lyrics:Shoehorn_With_Teeth

1 members found this post helpful.

Since you want SElinux, you should go with Centos. If you want a live system with some custom installed packages, youm can make your own with livemedia-creator: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Talk:..._use_a_Live_CD

Okay, thanks for the info so far. I'm often confusing on forums and considered a troll. I've looked around quite a bit and have found nothing that is advertised or labeled for what I'm needing.

What I think I need is something suitable for hostile environments Like Tails or Kali are. However, I'm looking for things not based on anonymity(such as Tails), and not focused on offensive/forensics(e.g. Kali), but rather suitable for hostile environments with day-to-day, average Internet browsing in mind, and possibly the downloading and sharing of Linux distribution torrents.

If this helps clarify and you have another suggestion, thanks in advance, and apologies for the confusion.

What do you consider to be a "hostile environment"? Hostile in which way(s)?

I don't think I understand enough about those things to answer appropriately, but right after I install a system it get compromised and becomes unusable very, very quickly. I can try describe what others have told me and the effect that it has a little, perhaps.

The effect I'm noticing is that while browsing the Internet, I seem to be re-directed from legitimate sites to forgeries that have malware and false information, inappropriate or offensive adverts, and corrupted and suspicious download links to the software I'm looking for. Also the hardware starts to malfunction very quickly, the sound starts playing false sounds, and the video drivers screw up.

I've been told my system is being attacked by malicious browser cookies and/or rootkits very, very quickly after I get the installation up and running. This is probably why Tails is offering me resistance to this. The Tor browser included with Tails is designed to be resilient to these, the kernel is hardened, and security updates are very frequent. However, it's not a perfect or permanent solution. and I need the ability to torrent linux distributions as that offers another type of download to ensure that if the ones from the Web URLs are bad, I have another option.

What has worked so far: Tails is perfect but by forcing everything through Tor, I can't use torrent software. Most people have recommended Kali but I was hoping for something not including the offensive/penetration/forensics elements, at least not yet. CentOS's SELinux often flags the attacks that are being used against me, but is more designed for servers and data-centers, and once compromised there's little I can do. It also seems easier to compromise than Tails.

I'm sure there's a distro that's good for this but not really labeled that way, but I can't find anything just yet.

I've also tried the networking approach by layering myself behind firewalls, and this provides some resilience, but it's only, and very, temporary. So far Tails has been my only salvation, and it's pretty stable and secure even plugged right into the modem.

If your operating environment is that level of hostile, I suggest you try running on a live distro, such as Porteus, and boot a non-persistent OS for a while. You can still save your data to a separate thumbdrive, but the OS itself is transient. Even if your enemies break through your firewall and invade your computer, it doesn't matter because when you reboot, everything gets reset.

http://porteus.org

I run on Porteus this way when I'm in an unknown environment (conferences, hotels, cafés, and so on). I keep my data on a separate thumbdrive so I hardly notice that I'm not on my usual system.

2 members found this post helpful.

I would purchase a used Watchguard firewall appliance off eBay and subscribe to a vpn service. I would also wipe the drive with zeros and reinstall the os.

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part of what you are describing in post #9 could be due to a hacked router.
try to factory-reset it.

and yes, you might be able to use tor network uninterrupted despite a hacked router.
so try a different router/internet connection.

not sure about the audio/video issues though, i think that's a separate problem.
could even be that your hard drive is broken, because afaiu you installed these distros, yet tails you use live?

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For any desktop system, the browser itself is going to be the absolute weakest and most vulnerable point in anything you either find or build. You'll need to isolate that. There is some partial isolation in some distros via apparmor. However, the default apparmor profiles for both the browsers and the torrents are so loose as to exist in name only.

If you are not going with a live distro at all, then you'll need to learn apparmor.

If you are going to run a live distro in a virtual machine on top of a regular distro on bare metal then you'll need to learn to share directories or small, custom partitions between the VM guest and the host systems.

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afaiu, op experience the same on every freshly created live medium - that would suggest that the problem lies outside the operating system.
it could also suggest that the very first thing they do on every new install is to navigate to a malware site that then manages to infest their browser immediately...

If any os behaved in that way I'd assume someone else in the house (teens obsessed with smiley gif tool bars etc) had been playing around..

1 members found this post helpful.