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

Summary

As always, we've covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We began by using GPG to encrypt, sign, and share encrypted files. We then looked at various methods of encrypting drives, partitions, directories, and sharable containers. After that, we looked at how to use OpenSSL to create keys, CSRs, and certificates. But since we don't want to use self-signed certificates all the time, and commercial certificates aren't always necessary, we looked at how to set up a private CA with Dogtag. We wrapped things up by looking at simple ways to harden the TLS configuration on the Apache web server, and we touched on the subject of mutual authentication.

Along the way, we had plenty of hands-on labs. That's good, because after all, idle hands are the devil's workshop, and we certainly don't want any of that.

In the next chapter, we'll look at ways...