Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Tajinder Kalsi
Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Tajinder Kalsi

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, system security has gained a lot of momentum and software professionals are focusing heavily on it. Linux is often treated as a highly secure operating system. However, the reality is that Linux has its share of security ?aws, and these security ?aws allow attackers to get into your system and modify or even destroy your important data. But there’s no need to panic, since there are various mechanisms by which these ?aws can be removed, and this book will help you learn about different types of Linux security to create a more secure Linux system. With a step-by-step recipe approach, the book starts by introducing you to various threats to Linux systems. Then, this book will walk you through customizing the Linux kernel and securing local files. Next, you will move on to managing user authentication both locally and remotely and mitigating network attacks. Later, you will learn about application security and kernel vulnerabilities. You will also learn about patching Bash vulnerability, packet filtering, handling incidents, and monitoring system logs. Finally, you will learn about auditing using system services and performing vulnerability scanning on Linux. By the end of this book, you will be able to secure your Linux systems and create a robust environment.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Contributors
Packt Upsell
Preface
Index

Securing network traffic using SSL


TLS and SSL are secure protocols and have been developed to put normal traffic in a protected, encrypted wrapper. With the help of these protocols, traffic can be sent between remote users in an encrypted format, thus protecting the traffic from being intercepted and read by anyone else. These certificates form an essential component of the data encryption process and help in making internet transactions secure.

Getting ready

Before we start with the creation and configuration of the self-signed certificate, we require Apache server to be installed on our Ubuntu system.

To install Apache on Ubuntu, run the following command:

apt-get update
apt-get install apache2

How to do it...

In this section, we will learn how to create a self-signed certificate to encrypt traffic to our Apache server:

  1. Once our Apache server has been installed, we can check the default web page by visiting the http://localhost link on our browser:
  1. However, when we try to access the same page...