TinHat

TinHat Linux is derived from hardened Gentoo and lives purely in RAM. It does not mount any file system from CD via uniunfs or otherwise. Rather, TinHat is a massive image which loads into tmpfs upon booting. One pays the prices of long boot times (several minutes), but the advantage afterwords is that there are no delays going back to the CD when starting applications.

TinHat was conceived as a challenge to the old mantra that physical access to a system means full access to the data. This is certainly true in the case of unencrypted file systems, and at least potentially true in the case of encrypted. Rather, TinHat aims towards the ideal of guaranteeing zero information loss should the attacker physically acquire the box.