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

Questions

  1. Which of the following would represent a MAC principle?
    A. You can set permissions on your own files and directories however you need to.
    B. You can allow any system process to access whatever you need it to access.
    C. System processes can only access whichever resources MAC policies allow them to access.
    D. MAC will allow access, even if DAC doesn't.
  2. How does SELinux work?
    A. It places a label on each system object and allows or denies access according to what SELinux policies say about the labels.
    B. It simply consults a profile for each system process to see what the process is allowed to do.
    C. It uses extended attributes that an administrator would set with the chattr utility.
    D. It allows each user to set his or her own MACs.
  3. Which of these utilities would you use to fix an incorrect SELinux security context?
    A. chattr
    B. chcontext
    C. restorecon
    D. setsebool...