Adamantix

Adamantix project is a Linux distribution that aims to achieve high security, while ensuring usability. Standard Linux distributions are known to be less secure despite providing better security compared to other operating systems. The primary reason behind this is that Linux was originally designed for speed and features, without due consideration to security. Adding security to a system that wasn't designed to be secure does not address most of its present and future problems. Hence, there needs to be a fundamental redesign of the system to make it more secure. This is precisely what Adamantix is set to accomplish.

Trusted Debian v1.0, now known as Adamantix v1.0, was the first Linux distribution to integrate support for PaX and SSP (Stack Smashing Protector). PaX is a kernel patch that protects against several buffer overflows and other memory corruption attacks. On the other hand, SSP is a GCC patch that provides stack protection, thus making it challenging to exploit stack overflows. Currently, the project is working on integrating RSBAC support. RSBAC is a kernel patch that provides a flexible and extensible security framework. This framework can implement almost any security feature and has various modules like improved chroot (jail) module, on-access virus scanning module, Linux capabilities management module, Linux resource management module, user ID changing management module, role-based access module, ACLs module, and others. Combining these modules creates a greater whole that provides superior security.

In the future, the number of modules is likely to grow, including modules for gr-security RBAC and SELinux, thus providing backward compatibility for legacy systems. RSBAC is a toolkit, similar to Linux's toolkit. Although it may take time to learn and understand RSBAC, investing such time is worthwhile and will give similar rewards as learning Linux.