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 (12 chapters)

Setting up sudo for users with only certain delegated privileges


A basic tenet of IT security philosophy is to give network users enough privileges so that they can get their jobs done, but no privileges beyond that. So, you'll want as few people as possible to have full sudo privileges. (If you have the root user account enabled, you'll want even fewer people to know the root password.) You'll also want a way to delegate privileges to people according to what their specific jobs are. Backup admins will need to be able to perform backup tasks, help desk personnel will need to perform user management tasks, and so on. With sudo, you can delegate these privileges and disallow users from doing any other administrative jobs that don't fit their job description.

The best way to explain this is to have you open visudo on your CentOS virtual machine. So, go ahead and start the CentOS VM and enter the following command:

sudo visudo

Unlike Ubuntu, CentOS has a fully commented and well-documented sudoers...