Part II Local security #

Physical security is very important. Linux production servers should be in locked data centers accessible only to people that have passed security checks. Depending on the environment and circumstances, you can also consider boot loader passwords.

An important step in securing a Linux system is to determine the primary functions or roles of the Linux server. Otherwise, it can be difficult to understand what needs to be secured and securing these Linux systems can prove ineffective. Therefore, it is critical to look at the default list of soft…

Servers should have separate file systems for at least /, /boot, /var, /tmp, and /home. This prevents, for example, logging space and temporary space under /var and /tmp from filling up the root partition. Third-party applications should be on separate file systems as well, for example under /opt.

Encrypting files, partitions, and entire disks prevents unauthorized access to your data and protects your confidential files and documents.

Databases and similar applications are often hosted on external servers that are serviced by third-party staff. Certain data center maintenance tasks require third-party staff to directly access affected systems. In such cases, privacy requirements necessitate disk encryption.

It is important that all system and vendor accounts that are not used for logins are locked. To get a list of unlocked accounts on your system, you can check for accounts that do not have an encrypted password string starting with ! or * in the /etc/shadow file. If you lock an account using either p…

This chapter explains how to restrict access to the cron and at daemons to improve the security of a system.

spectre-meltdown-checker is a shell script to test if your system is vulnerable to the several speculative execution vulnerabilities that are in nearly all CPUs manufactured in the past 20 years. This is a hardware flaw that potentially allows an attacker to read all data on the system. On cloud computing services, where multiple virtual machines are on a single physical host, an attacker can gain access to all virtual machines. Fixing these vulnerabilities requires redesigning and replacing CPUs. Until this happens, there are several software patches that mitigate these vulnerabilities. If you have kept your SUSE systems updated, all these patches should already be installed.

spectre-meltdown-checker generates a detailed report. It is impossible to guarantee that your system is secure, but it shows you which mitigations are in place, and potential vulnerabilities.

The YaST module Security Center provides a central control panel for configuring security-related settings for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Use it to configure security aspects such as settings for the login procedure and for password creation, for boot permissions, user creation, or for default file permissions. Launch it from the YaST control center with Security and Users › Security Center. The Security Center dialog opens to the Security Overview, with additional configuration dialogs in the left and right panes.

Polkit is an authentication framework used in graphical Linux desktop environments, for fine-grained management of access rights on the system. Traditionally, there is a strong separation of privileges on Linux between the root user as the fully authorized administrator account, and all other accounts and groups on the system. These non-administrator accounts may have certain additional privileges, like accessing sound hardware through an audio group. However, this kind of privilege is fixed and cannot be granted only in certain specific situations, or for a certain duration of time.

Instead of fully switching to the root user (using programs such as sudo) for gaining higher privileges, Polkit grants specific privileges to a user or group on an as-needed basis. This is controlled by configuration files that describe individual actions that need to be authorized in a dynamic context.

POSIX ACLs (access control lists) can be used as an expansion of the traditional permission concept for file system objects. With ACLs, permissions can be defined more flexibly than with the traditional permission concept.

Securing your systems is a mandatory task for any mission-critical system administrator. Because it is impossible to always guarantee that the system is not compromised, it is important to do extra checks regularly (for example with cron) to ensure that the system is still under your control. This is where AIDE, the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, comes into play.