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

In this chapter, we've seen that a default configuration of Secure Shell isn't as secure as we'd like it to be, and we've seen what to do about it. We've looked at how to set up key-based authentication, and we've looked at lots of different options that can lock down the SSH server. We also looked at how to disable weak encryption algorithms, and at how the new system-wide crypto policies on RHEL 8/CentOS 8 make doing that really easy. Along the way, we looked at setting up access controls, and at creating different configurations for different users, groups, and hosts. After demoing how to confine SFTP users to their own home directories, we used SSHFS to share a remote directory. We wrapped up this chapter by presenting a handy way to log into our Linux servers from a Windows desktop machine.

Conspicuous by their absence are a couple of...