North Korea spreads total control to digital realms with its own OS

The Red Star features a Korean word processor, a calendar and an app that allows the users to compose and transcribe music.

Speaking to Reuters, researchers Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess say that Red Star OS is the realization of Kim Jong Il’s dream of building a North Korean operating system.

The researchers detailed the operating system at a conference this past weekend, revealing that it is largely a new system developed by the nation for the nation – one that is paranoid and, at least more recently, tasked with squashing the infiltration of foreign media into the insular nation. “This is what they’ve done”, Grunow said as quoted by Reuters. North Korean engineers have extremely improved the KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile, first unveiled at military parades in 2012 and 2013, making its design simpler and boosting its reliability. The home-grown OS is based on Fedora Linux and features a Mac OS X alike skin, however a lot of effort has been put in to make it a tool of the state; with unique tagging and watermarking of all user files, other user privacy invading features, and tamper-proofing of the system. Although it is a very secure operating system in many ways, you should never have to experience it. Like many other practices of Korean regime, its objective is to keep the people led by Kim Jong Un isolated.

“Maybe this can be a bit worry-pushed”, stated Grunow. “They may want to be independent of other operating systems because they fear back doors” potentially allowing spying on North Korea’s digital activities, he added. RedStar included a system in the OS that allowed it to monitor any changes a user might make, reacting according to the actions a user takes. We will analyse the interaction of the components and the protection mechanisms and provide information on how to deactivate some of the malicious functionality of Red Star OS.

The dictatorship is not alone in its quest for a proprietary computer system. If a user tries to tweak any major settings – disable the firewall, for example – the computer will just reboot or toss up an error.

The Red Star OS is also created to contribute to a crackdown on illegal exchange of foreign media content, such as films, music or document files, which in North Korea are usually distributed via USB sticks from person-to-person. “It’s done stealthily, and touches files you haven’t even opened”, said Grunow.

There’s no sign in the operating system, the researchers say, of the kinds of cyber attack capability North Korea has been accused of.

The researchers also said they have no data on how many computers in North Korea are already using this system, as they obtained it from a website located outside the country, while visitors to the country say most computers there still use 15-year-old Windows XP.