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Fast, scalable and secure over-the-air bootstrap of Linux operating systems with Wi-Fi ad hoc networks

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Abstract

This article describes and evaluates the performance of DETIboot, a system conceived for securely deploying temporary Linux systems into countless receiving hosts close enough to a Wi-Fi DETIboot server. This system was created with the ultimate goal of installing, in numerous students’ laptops and just-in-time, special Linux distributions for being temporarily used in practical classes. In this document we present an overview of DETIboot, a comprehensive description of the coding used in the broadcast communication and a detailed performance evaluation in a spacious auditorium. This evaluation did not involve security features to reduce the amount of variables influencing the final results. However, previous experiments allow us to extrapolate a maximum of 5% increase in the download time due to security. On average, it took us 50.1 s to download a 225 MiB Slax Linux over 802.11g, taking on average 15% more time than the theoretical lower bound of our setup (43.4 s). The influence of the position of receivers in the auditorium was not prominent.

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Notes

  1. http://www.symantec.com/ghost-solution-suite

  2. http://www.udpcast.linux.lu

  3. A ramdisk is portion of RAM used as disk; a ramdisk distribution is a distribution that installs itself on such a disk, therefore in a non-permanent way (disappears after a reboot).

  4. In order to minimize interferences, the most frequently chosen channels happen to be 1, 6 and 11.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the researchers that contributed to the design and development of DETIboot, namely João Cardoso, Carlos Faneca, Simão Reis and Cláudio Patrício. This work was partially funded by FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology), in the context of the projects PEst-OE/EEI/UI0127/2014 and CodeStream (PTDC/EEI-TEL/3006/2012).

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  1. DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal

    André Zúquete & José Vieira

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  1. André Zúquete
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  2. José Vieira
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Correspondence to André Zúquete.

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Zúquete, A., Vieira, J. Fast, scalable and secure over-the-air bootstrap of Linux operating systems with Wi-Fi ad hoc networks. Wireless Netw 24, 2043–2060 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-017-1450-0

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