Question

How can I check in my application that the system is running in normal mode, not booted with a bootable media, like CD-ROM or USB. What files, services, or any other thing need to be overlooked?

This is really needed, as I need to achieve some level of security along with other measures and techniques that I use to secure my application. Any ideas?

P.S. I use Ubuntu 12.4

Answer 1

Just to wrap it up, if you want to know if your system boots up normally through the regular booting process from grub or lilo, you can check the /proc/cmdline, where it tells you where your system booted up, and what is boot sector unique id for that boot partition, example: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-*****-generic.

Not only this file can tell you about the UUID of the different partitions of your system, there are other ways that can help you to do the same:

1- ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Oct 13 14:12 3894c432-c0ab-4610-b1de-b2121e54b4e3 -> ../../md1

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 13 14:12 87431be0-6af5-459e-9ddb-91028fd637cb ->./../sdd1

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Oct 13 14:12 b781ce12-657f-4831-8ed5-e3c5b7c04cf7 ->../..md125

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Oct 13 14:12 c87d9576-55a6-4c3e-a1fb-04e15c72d94e -> ../../md2

2- blkid

/dev/sda1: UUID=”b781ce12-657f-4831-8ed5-e3c5b7c04cf7″ SEC_TYPE=”ext2″ TYPE=”ext3″

/dev/sdb1: UUID=”bb10b5c9-acb6-e72c-768b-29c85cd8b45c” TYPE=”linux_raid_member”

/dev/sdd1: LABEL=”backups” UUID=”87431be0-6af5-459e-9ddb-91028fd637cb” SEC_TYPE=”ext2″ TYPE=”ext3″

/dev/md125: UUID=”b781ce12-657f-4831-8ed5-e3c5b7c04cf7″ TYPE=”ext3″

/dev/md1: UUID=”3894c432-c0ab-4610-b1de-b2121e54b4e3″ TYPE=”swap”

/dev/md2: UUID=”c87d9576-55a6-4c3e-a1fb-04e15c72d94e” TYPE=”ext3″

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May be there other tools that can do the same job, but I think the above are sufficient to solve a problem such as mine.

P.S. Thanks for all of those who contributed in this thread :))