When evaluating the security of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation, consider the following:

Password protection for the BIOS (or BIOS equivalent) and the boot loader can prevent unauthorized users who have physical access to systems from booting using removable media or obtaining root privileges through single user mode. The security measures you should take to protect against such attacks depends both on the sensitivity of the information on the workstation and the location of the machine.

For example, if a machine is used in a trade show and contains no sensitive information, then it may not be critical to prevent such attacks. However, if an employee's laptop with private, unencrypted SSH keys for the corporate network is left unattended at that same trade show, it could lead to a major security breach with ramifications for the entire company.

If the workstation is located in a place where only authorized or trusted people have access, however, then securing the BIOS or the boot loader may not be necessary.

grub-md5-crypt

password --md5 <password-hash>

title DOS lock

title DOS lock password --md5 <password-hash>

Passwords are the primary method that Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses to verify a user's identity. This is why password security is so important for protection of the user, the workstation, and the network.

For security purposes, the installation program configures the system to use Message-Digest Algorithm (MD5) and shadow passwords. It is highly recommended that you do not alter these settings.

If MD5 passwords are deselected during installation, the older Data Encryption Standard (DES) format is used. This format limits passwords to eight alphanumeric characters (disallowing punctuation and other special characters), and provides a modest 56-bit level of encryption.

If shadow passwords are deselected during installation, all passwords are stored as a one-way hash in the world-readable /etc/passwd file, which makes the system vulnerable to offline password cracking attacks. If an intruder can gain access to the machine as a regular user, they can copy the /etc/passwd file to their own machine and run any number of password cracking programs against it. If there is an insecure password in the file, it is only a matter of time before the password cracker discovers it.

Shadow passwords eliminate this type of attack by storing the password hashes in the file /etc/shadow, which is readable only by the root user.

This forces a potential attacker to attempt password cracking remotely by logging into a network service on the machine, such as SSH or FTP. This sort of brute-force attack is much slower and leaves an obvious trail as hundreds of failed login attempts are written to system files. Of course, if the cracker starts an attack in the middle of the night on a system with weak passwords, the cracker may have gained access before dawn and edited the log files to cover their tracks.

In addition to format and storage considerations is the issue of content. The single most important thing a user can do to protect their account against a password cracking attack is create a strong password.

chage -M 90 <username>

chage <username>

~]# chage davido
Changing the aging information for davido
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default

        Minimum Password Age [0]: 10
        Maximum Password Age [99999]: 90
        Last Password Change (YYYY-MM-DD) [2006-08-18]:
        Password Expiration Warning [7]:
        Password Inactive [-1]:
        Account Expiration Date (YYYY-MM-DD) [1969-12-31]:
~]#

When administering a home machine, the user must perform some tasks as the root user or by acquiring effective root privileges via a setuid program, such as sudo or su. A setuid program is one that operates with the user ID (UID) of the program's owner rather than the user operating the program. Such programs are denoted by an s in the owner section of a long format listing, as in the following example:

-rwsr-xr-x    1 root     root        47324 May  1 08:09 /bin/su

For the system administrators of an organization, however, choices must be made as to how much administrative access users within the organization should have to their machine. Through a PAM module called pam_console.so, some activities normally reserved only for the root user, such as rebooting and mounting removable media are allowed for the first user that logs in at the physical console (refer to Section 48.4, “Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)” for more information about the pam_console.so module.) However, other important system administration tasks, such as altering network settings, configuring a new mouse, or mounting network devices, are not possible without administrative privileges. As a result, system administrators must decide how much access the users on their network should receive.

usermod -G wheel <username>

sudo <command>

juan ALL=(ALL) ALL

%users  localhost=/sbin/shutdown -h now

While user access to administrative controls is an important issue for system administrators within an organization, monitoring which network services are active is of paramount importance to anyone who administers and operates a Linux system.

Many services under Red Hat Enterprise Linux behave as network servers. If a network service is running on a machine, then a server application (called a daemon), is listening for connections on one or more network ports. Each of these servers should be treated as a potential avenue of attack.

After the necessary network services are configured, it is important to implement a firewall.

Firewalls prevent network packets from accessing the system's network interface. If a request is made to a port that is blocked by a firewall, the request is ignored. If a service is listening on one of these blocked ports, it does not receive the packets and is effectively disabled. For this reason, care should be taken when configuring a firewall to block access to ports not in use, while not blocking access to ports used by configured services.

For most users, the best tool for configuring a simple firewall is the graphical firewall configuration tool which ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux: the Security Level Configuration Tool (system-config-securitylevel). This tool creates broad iptables rules for a general-purpose firewall using a control panel interface.

Refer to Section 48.8.2, “Basic Firewall Configuration” for more information about using this application and its available options.

For advanced users and server administrators, manually configuring a firewall with iptables is probably a better option. Refer to Section 48.8, “Firewalls” for more information. Refer to Section 48.9, “IPTables” for a comprehensive guide to the iptables command.

As the size and popularity of the Internet has grown, so has the threat of communication interception. Over the years, tools have been developed to encrypt communications as they are transferred over the network.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ships with two basic tools that use high-level, public-key-cryptography-based encryption algorithms to protect information as it travels over the network.

OpenSSH is a safer way to access a remote machine and replaces older, unencrypted services like telnet and rsh. OpenSSH includes a network service called sshd and three command line client applications:

GPG is one way to ensure private email communication. It can be used both to email sensitive data over public networks and to protect sensitive data on hard drives.