Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

By : Donald A. Tevault
Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

By: Donald A. Tevault

Overview of this book

From creating networks and servers to automating the entire working environment, Linux has been extremely popular with system administrators for the last couple of decades. However, security has always been a major concern. With limited resources available in the Linux security domain, this book will be an invaluable guide in helping you get your Linux systems properly secured. Complete with in-depth explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book begins by helping you set up a practice lab environment and takes you through the core functionalities of securing Linux. You'll practice various Linux hardening techniques and advance to setting up a locked-down Linux server. As you progress, you will also learn how to create user accounts with appropriate privilege levels, protect sensitive data by setting permissions and encryption, and configure a firewall. The book will help you set up mandatory access control, system auditing, security profiles, and kernel hardening, and finally cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques to secure your Linux environment efficiently. By the end of this Linux security book, you will be able to confidently set up a Linux server that will be much harder for malicious actors to compromise.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Setting up a Secure Linux System
8
Section 2: Mastering File and Directory Access Control (DAC)
11
Section 3: Advanced System Hardening Techniques

firewalld for Red Hat systems

So far, we've looked at iptables, a generic firewall management system that's available on all Linux distros, and ufw, which is available for Debian/Ubuntu-type systems. For our next act, we turn our attention to firewalld, which is the default firewall manager on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7/8 and all of their offspring.

But here's where things get a bit confusing. On RHEL/CentOS 7, firewalld is implemented differently from the way it is on RHEL/CentOS 8. That's because, on RHEL/CentOS 7, firewalld uses the iptables engine as its backend. On RHEL/CentOS 8, firewalld uses nftables as its backend. Either way, you can't create rules with normal iptables or nftables commands because firewalld stores the rules in an incompatible format.

Until very recently, firewalld was only available for RHEL 7/8 and their offspring. Now, however...