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Fedora Kiosk
Summary
The Fedora Kiosk spin, is a secure kiosk live operating system, that will allow users to login to a system and access the internet in a secure manner.
Status
A page exists at http://spins.fedoraproject.org/kiosk/ but there are no working download links. The most recent blog post by the developer was Introducing the Fedora Kiosk Spin, April 30th 2010, at which stage it was "under development (as is F13)."
Owner(s)
- Name: Daniel Walsh <dwalsh>
- email: dwalsh@redhat.com
Detailed Description
The Fedora Kiosk is a Fedora based live operating system that takes advantage of SELinux and namespacing to setup a secure kiosk environment.
When you use a kiosk system you need to worry about the person that used the kiosk before you and after you. The person who used it before you could have left a process running on the system that can watch your keystrokes. The person who uses the kiosk after you can search through your home directory for data stored by firefox, including history, potentially credit card data, vpn access codes, etc.
The Fedora kiosk uses the xguest package which sets up a limited priviledged SELinux xguest user. This user is allowed to login to the box without a password if SELinux is enabeled and enforcing, and there are no processes running with the same UID. The user account is locked down so it can not execute any setuid/setgid applications. The only network ports it can connect to are web ports. It can not execute any content in its home directory. The home directory/tmp directory is created when the user logs in and destroyed when the user logs out. If the account attempts to leave a process around after logout the system will attempt to kill the process and no other kiosk users will be allowed to login until the processes with this uid, are killed.
Root account is disabled.
It is also a live operating system so, rebooting the kiosk, will reset it to a known good state.
Benefit to Fedora
Fedora and its adoption of SELinux makes it an ideal platform for building a kiosk. Since Fedora support for pam_namespace, SELinux and xguest make it ideally suited for this type of environment.
Kickstart File
http://people.fedoraproject.org/~dwalsh/SELinux/kiosk/kiosk.ks
ISO Name / FS Label
Fedora-13-x86_64-kiosk
http://people.fedoraproject.org/~dwalsh/SELinux/kiosk/kiosk.iso
Dependencies
Scope / Testing
Additional security checks and usability testing needs to be done. As people come up with ideas of how they can break the security model of the kiosk, we need to react.
Also need to make sure there is enough functionality to use the kiosk in say a library setting. Closed source applications might be needed like flashplugin.
Spins Page
Slogan
Secure kiosks: no longer an oxymoron.
Spin description
The goal of the Fedora Kiosk Spin is to create an operating system that can only be used as a kiosk. It is intended for use in public locations such as libraries, schools, and event venues.
Imagine a machine sitting at a library (for example) running a liveDVD a single guest user account - root (administrative) account has been disabled. This kiosk can only talk to web ports, and when you log out all files and processes get destroyed so there is nothing left in the user account for the next user to search for. Since all processes are destroyed on logout, you can rest assured no one left a process to watch your keystrokes. Starting from scratch with a clean system is as easy as a reboot.
With the Fedora Kiosk Spin, your terminal can be as secure as you want it to be. Learn more.
About
How it works:
The Fedora Kiosk Spin relies on SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) for its combination of functionality and security. It features the xguest package, which creates a user of type xguest_t, a special user type designed specifically with kiosk usage in mind.
Also created for the Fedora Kiosk Spin is a PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) called pam_sepermit which allows certain users (xguest) to login without a password if SELinux is on in enforcing mode. The spin uses pam_namespace to setup temporary home and /tmp directories.
The system is easily extended by building a liveimage where iptables force all network traffic to go to a singe host or network so that you can lock down your kiosk to only work on said network.
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