Septor 2019
Mayank Sharma has a soft spot for projects that promise to protect his privacy. But is this one any better than his current favourite, Tails?
Mayank Sharma has a soft spot for projects that promise to protect his privacy. But is this one any better than his current favourite, Tails?
Septor is developed by the Serbian Linux project, which produces the Serbian Linux distribution designed for Serbianspeaking users. Septor 2019 is the project’s second release of the distribution that’s designed for the privacy conscious. The distro, unlike the website, defaults to the English language, which makes it usable to a wider audience.
Septor 2019 is based on Debian’s current testing branch named Buster and uses KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment. It ships with a fairly recent kernel and the usual slew of desktop productivity tools that you’d expect on a regular desktop release. There are KDE stalwarts like K3b, Okular and Kontact along with mainstream open source behemoths like Libreoffice, VLC and GIMP.
To earn its privacy credentials the distro routes all Internet-bound traffic through the Tor anonymous network. Since the Tor project asks users to always use the latest version of the Tor browser, Septor doesn’t ship with one by default and instead includes a launcher script that’ll grab the latest release over the Internet. In addition to the browser, the distro also includes a couple of tools that are designed for use over the Tor network. There’s the anonymous file-sharing program called Onionshare and the Ricochet instant messaging client. Furthermore, the distribution is out-of-the-box configured to connect to the Internet via the Tor proxy. In essence, this means that all the other Internet-centric programs bundled with the distribution, including the Thunderbird email client, Hexchat IRC client and Quiterss feed reader will all connect to the Internet over the Tor network.
Besides the Tor tools, the distro also has a few other privacy and security enhancing programs such as the Sweeper utility to clear the cache and temporary files, the Veracrypt encryption utility and the Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit (MAT). If you need more you can use the bundled Synaptic package manager to grab packages from the official Debian buster repositories. Because the distro is brimming with programs, it weighs in as a hefty 2GB ISO. The distro can be used either as a Live environment or you can install it to the hard disk using the standard Debian installer.
In a tailspin
Thanks to its collection of software, Septor might seem impressive, but the distro offers little incentive to move away from Tails. The de-facto Tor-based distro offers the best environment for users to safeguard their privacy. Sure, Septor might outscore Tails in terms of the number of installed tools, but their collection of privacy and security-related programs is fairly identical.
Furthermore, Tails proudly advertises the fact that it takes special care to not touch the computer’s hard disks, even if it’s got an earmarked swap partition. To use it as your daily driver you can create an encrypted persistent storage partition on a bootable USB. From a purely privacy perspective, we feel this approach makes much better sense than installing the distro, which is the only form of persistence available in Septor. Furthermore, Tails uses scripts to wipe the computer’s RAM when you shut it down to protect you against any forensic recovery techniques. You won’t find any such mechanism in Septor.
Finally, there’s the issue of documentation, which adds another level of complexity to using Septor. The little documentation that the distro offers is in Serbian and English reading users at the mercy of Google Translate. The lack of a forum or other avenues to seek support is another reason that prevents us from recommending Septor. However, we’ll keep an eye on the distro since it comes from a mature project that’s been around for quite some time and is popular in its part of the world.