Monday, October 29, 2012

Cool Linux system hardening tutorial

It's a computer lab assignment, locking down your Linux boxen.  It has some great suggestions and pointers to useful tools.  Security geeks will like this.

Me, I particularly like the SCAP stuff which IMHO is the most significant security advance in maybe 15 years.  And I simply hadn't ever run across limits.conf which looks like the shiznit.

We now return you to your regular blogging schedule.

5 comments:

  1. drjimOctober 29, 2012 at 7:44 PM

    Interesting.....

    I'm trying to get it running on OpenSUSE 12.2 with no joy.

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  2. JimOctober 30, 2012 at 3:24 PM

    Thank you, Borepatch. Frequently you turn up some real interesting goodies.

    I've never heard of SCAP before and it looks worth further investigation. The CTS 2311 course looks good, but I almost feel sorry for someone just starting out in the field for the amount of material they must absorb just to get a decent overview. Some people spend a significant portion of their careers on just one of those bullet points in the lectures.

    drjim - good luck with OpenSuse 12.2. Without knowing what you're having issues with, it's hard to know what to recommend. I liked this part of the 12.2 portal; the package management info was useful and points at various additional repositories (you may still need to get some things built).

    http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Documentation

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  3. drjimOctober 30, 2012 at 4:07 PM

    BTDT, still trying to figure out HOW to get it to do the scan.

    Probably a configuration issue, but the OpenSCAP website is sorely lacking in good, readable "HOWTO".

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  4. JimOctober 30, 2012 at 9:45 PM

    Gotcha. I forsee the effort being interesting, as a search on 'openscap' at opensuse.org yields nada. Oh well, at least there's some Fedora doc and sample OVAL/XCCDF content out there. Just a couple things I noticed and then I'll stop. Wouldn't do to wear out Borepatch's patience ;-)

    http://infotechmike.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-to-use-openscap-in-fedora-release.html

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OpenSCAP

    Good luck.

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  5. DaddyBearNovember 1, 2012 at 6:16 AM

    SANS puts out an excellent Linux hardening guide. I took the Unix/Linux security course that's based on it. Hal Pomeranz does an excellent job expanding on the "Why" of the steps.

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