Cybersecurity

North Korea’s Paranoid Operating System Revealed

Two German researchers recently ran an analysis of North Korea’s homegrown operating system, Red Star OS. Turns out, Red Star mirrors quite closely the political climate in Pyongyang: it’s rife with invasive snooping on users and paranoia.

Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess from German security company ERNW said that while expectations were for a system that is a pale copy of western counterparts, Red Star OS has quite a lot of unique features, and is a fully fledged operating system.

“[The late leader] Kim Jong-il said North Korea should develop a system of their own. This is what they’ve done,” Gunrow told the Chaos Communication congress in Hamburg last month.

North Korea has been working on its operating system for more than a decade now. The latest version was written around 2013, and is based on Fedora Linux. Unlike previous version, it no longer sports the look and feel of Windows XP, and has adopted an appearance similar to Apple’s OSX.