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

An overview of iptables


A common misconception is that iptables is the name of the Linux firewall. In reality, the name of the Linux firewall is netfilter and every Linux distro has it built-in. What we know as iptables is just one of several command-line utilities that we can use to manage netfilter. It was originally introduced as a feature of Linux kernel, version 2.6, so it's been around for a long time. With iptables, you do have a few advantages:

  • It's been around long enough that most Linux admins already know how to use it
  • It's easy to use iptables commands in shell scripts to create your own custom firewall configuration
  • It has great flexibility, in that you can use it to set up a simple port filter, a router, or a virtual private network
  • It comes preinstalled on pretty much every Linux distro, although most distros don't come with it preconfigured
  • It's very well documented, with free of charge, book-length tutorials available on the internet

But, as you might know, there are also a few...