Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

By : Donald A. Tevault
Book Image

Mastering Linux Security and Hardening

By: Donald A. Tevault

Overview of this book

This book has extensive coverage of techniques that will help prevent attackers from breaching your system, by building a much more secure Linux environment. You will learn various security techniques such as SSH hardening, network service detection, setting up firewalls, encrypting file systems, protecting user accounts, authentication processes, and so on. Moving forward, you will also develop hands-on skills with advanced Linux permissions, access control, special modes, and more. Lastly, this book will also cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques to get your work done efficiently. By the end of this book, you will be confident in delivering a system that will be much harder to compromise.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface

How AppArmor can benefit a systems administrator


AppArmor is the Mandatory Access Control system that comes installed with the SUSE and the Ubuntu families of Linux. Although it's designed to do pretty much the same job as SELinux, its mode of operation is substantially different:

  • SELinux labels all system processes and all objects such as files, directories, or network ports. For files and directories, SELinux stores the labels in their respective inodes as extended attributes. (An inode is the basic filesystem component that contains all information about a file, except for the file name.)
  • AppArmor uses pathname enforcement, which means that you specify the path to the executable file that you want for AppArmor to control. This way, there's no need to insert labels into the extended attributes of files or directories.
  • With SELinux, you have system-wide protection out of the box.
  • With AppArmor, you have a profile for each individual application.
  • With either SELinux or AppArmor, you might occasionally...