Why use a CD-ROM based system?
There are several advantages to using a CDROM based system in various security related environments. The main system is centered around the ramdisk; a compressed file system image which is loaded at boot time. Any changes to the ramdisk image are temporary, and will be undone upon the next reboot. Furthermore the ramdisk, kernel, binaries, etc, related to the operating system are kept on read-only media(CDROM). This means that if the security of a machine running a CDROM based system is ever compromised the attacker can at best maintain control of the machine until the next reboot. So there is no real threat of having to go through the tedious task of rebuilding and hardening the system after a successful attack is discovered. The bug can be fixed, and a new ISO and CD made with relative ease.
