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

Applying OpenSCAP policies with oscap


SCAP, the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), was created by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. It consists of hardening guides, hardening templates, and baseline configuration guides for setting up secure systems. OpenSCAP is a set of free open source software tools that can be used to implement SCAP. It consists of the following:

  • Security profiles that you can apply to a system. There are different profiles for meeting the requirements of several different certifying agencies.
  • Security guides to help with the initial setup of your system.
  • The oscap command-line utility to apply security templates.
  • On Red Hat-type systems that have a desktop interface, you have SCAP Workbench, a GUI-type utility.

You can install OpenSCAP on either the Red Hat or the Ubuntu distros, but it's much better implemented on the Red Hat distros. For one thing, the Red Hat world has the very cool SCAP Workbench, but the Ubuntu world doesn't. When you...