CHAOS Alternatives

CHAOS

Midnight Code; the best kind.

This project started as tool development work for the IT Security group at Macquarie University in 2003 - a team that included Rob Dartnell, Ian Latter and Ty Miller. The need there was to demonstrate the weakness in one particular application's security, via its one hashed, network transmitted, password. The openMosix cluster software, at that time, was available via a number of Linux distributions, but these were neither secure nor dynamic enough to support the campus PC environment that the cluster software was to be deployed into.

The CHAOS distribution was created to fill this need, and was developed for almost two years under the GPL to allow the openMosix community members to benefit from the security enhancements employed around the openMosix software (the clustering technology that is added to the Linux kernel). Security improvements made by the team included IPSEC tunnels for all cluster communications, state aware packet filtering for each node, a tiny OS image which allowed for PXE booting to remote PC memory, zero-touch cluster creation, etc.

A presentation was made to the Australian Unix Users Group (AUUG) Security Symposium in February 2004 at about two thirds of the way through CHAOS' two year development cycle.

In mid to late 2004 CHAOS was adapted to the Cooperative Linux (coLinux) framework, allowing openMosix to run as a node on a Windows PC for the first time. This was significant as there was now the ability to run ad-hoc clusters 24x7, and not just out of business hours. The version of CHAOS created for coLinux was dubbed CosMos (Chaos-OS on Microsoft-OS) and was also released under the GPL - complete with Windows installer software.