Lightweight Portable Security

» see tens.af.mil as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The problem it solved is specific and still unsolved. A government employee needs to reach an internal network from a computer nobody trusts, usually their own, and the hard drive in that computer may be carrying anything. Lightweight Portable Security answered it by refusing to touch the drive at all. You booted the machine from a CD or a USB stick and the whole operating system loaded into RAM. What you got was a small Xfce desktop holding a browser and support for the smartcard readers the Department of Defense had approved, and not much else. Power off and the session was gone, because there had never been anywhere for it to persist.

It was built by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate, out of a program the lab traced back to the Anti-Tamper Software Protection Initiative in 2001, and the Air Force puts its active work on this distribution at 2007 onward. The public edition arrived as a download in 2011 and got the kind of attention a free hardened Linux from the US military will always get: Lifehacker wrote it up that July, and for the next decade it circulated among people who had no connection to the Department of Defense but liked the idea of a clean browser that evaporated.

At version 1.7 the name changed to Trusted End Node Security, which is what the thing had always been called internally, and the download page kept a line explaining the rename for everyone who had bookmarked the old one. TENS is the name on the death certificate; LPS is the name people remember.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pandemic year ~

2020 was its moment. Several million federal employees went home at once, many of them to a personal laptop, and the National Security Agency published guidance that June on doing that safely. The advice was to use a government computer, and where that was impossible, the NSA named TENS as a step an individual employee could take to make their own machine less dangerous. The project's homepage grew a telework banner explaining which editions were allowed on official equipment and which were not.

The last engineering work was about staying bootable. Secure Boot had become normal on new PCs, and a 2020 note observed that it would stop older TENS editions from loading at all; compatibility landed in 2021. Then the money stopped.

Nothing about this one reached me. Turkey has its own smartcard culture, mostly e-signature readers for banking and official filings, and nobody there was handing out a bootable operating system to go with them. The distribution was finished and working on the day the funding decision landed.

~ the program office ~

The final editions of TENS and the bundled Encryption Wizard shipped in April and May 2021, with version 3.0.4.1 of the operating system dated 30 April and described in its own release notes as potentially final. In August the website announced that the program office had been decommissioned. The Defense Information Systems Agency was no longer willing to fund the work, and no other agency had agreed to champion it.

Both of its hosts are gone now. Neither tens.af.mil nor spi.dod.mil resolves, and the last page the Internet Archive caught is the ordinary download list from 18 August 2021, still offering an installer and a release history to anyone who got there in time.

~ the survivor ~

Encryption Wizard outlived its parent. The Mission Planning group at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center took the utility over and stood up a replacement site, gettens.online, which states the position plainly: the TENS program office was managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate, and after DISA cancelled program funding this website was repurposed to allow users to continue to download the public-facing software tools, while the TENS website itself is no longer accessible. A Java file encryptor that was once a bundled extra is now the whole estate, last updated 22 February 2022.

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