This e-mail is about security and user friendliness, and how I think this guide perhaps may be modified into something better. This may also be me misunderstanding the purpose of this guide. Be aware.
I agree that Government Security Agencies and Banks has more to loose than a lot of other people :-)
Last night I couldn't get to sleep, due to my big mouth, so I thought a bit more about the security guide. I guess this guide aims to the users of Fedora. This may be a huuge misconception on my part, but, I though regular home users are the main users of Fedora. So.. this guide should perhaps to be focused on that kind of usage and that kind of knowledge levels.
My experience, working with security in highly secure government/telco environments is that security and ease of use/user friendliness is two most important main counter parts.
On one hand, it's "pretty easy" to make something extremely secure, but extremely secure systems is a total drag to be in - because they are difficult to access, use and communicate to and from, due to all restrictions and security related administration. I believe the standard Fedora user never would want such a system. In a system like that security has compromised to much user friendliness for it to be fun. If security isn't your definition of happy-happy joy-joy :-)
I had a thought that perhaps this guide should mainly not focus on different things that makes a system secure as a bank. Instead perhaps it should focus on covering techniques that allows ones home computer to operate in a secure _and_ user friendly manner.
Here's what I wrote on my phone last night, trying to kill demons of guilt and shame spawned out of my nonconstructive mail yesterday. I tried to sort them in order of positive impact on security weighed against user friendliness.
1) Keep your system up-to-date. 1.1) Perhaps advocacy that users should prefer "Yum installed software", as it automatically will get updated via Yum. 2) Keep backups of your data. 2.1) Some easy ways of backing up data. Burn on CD/DVD, put on external storage, backup hard drive, etc. S/W recommendations. 3) Running a firewall. 3.1) Using the shipped Fedora firewall setup tools, enabling the firewall at install. 4) Use SE-Linux 5) Use common sense 5.1 Do not accept unknown stuff/software from unknown people. If a stranger walked up to you in real life and offered you an unidentifiable object.. and you at the same time constantly heard and read stories of people accepting unidentifiable objects from strangers - finding out the object was a bomb / robotic miniature robber - YOU WOULD RUN AWAY! 5) Do not run server software that you do not use (as web, mail, ftp, nfs or even a ssh server (if it's a desktop)) 6) Advanced topics - Here one may cover more "user unfriendly" stuff for the paranoid government spy user types :-) 6.1 Encryption of different kinds (files, file systems, e-mail, etc) 6.2 Advanced hardening techniques and tools. 6.3 Advanced auditing techniques and tools 6.4 Security policy and/or paranoid thinking
Some more links.
Organizations: http://www.cert.org/archive/pdf/aia-handbook.pdf http://www.first.org/resources/guides/ http://www.sans.org/reading_room/
//M
mån 2009-01-05 klockan 12:00 -0500
Message: 2 Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:23:45 -0500 From: Eric Christensen eric@christensenplace.us Subject: Re: PATCH[1/1] Linux Security Guide To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 49617D41.5040205@christensenplace.us Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Good resources. Thanks for sending them. My reasoning for building that part of the Security Guide based on US Government documents and not documents from Universities or commercial sources has a simple explanation. Government computers HAVE to be secure. I've seen way too many universities and businesses run a half-way security mindset. They are too interested in the bottom line than a secure system even though a secure system will help the bottom line in the long run.
The only other industry that I would like to pull from is the banking industry. They are generally notorious for their secure systems (I'm talking about the larger banks). They could stand to loose billions of dollars if they are "broken into". Of course most of the banks make their documentation secret as to not tip off anyone with a possible documented flaw.
I agree that we should be looking at multiple sources and that will come in time. Please feel free to add information into the guide. I'll be happy to read any patches that you, or anyone else, has to offer to the guide. If you have any specific interests, please let me know!
Thanks, Eric Christensen E-Mail: sparks@fedoraproject.org GPG Key: BD0C14C1
Magnus Glantz wrote:
I'm sorry if I came off a bit rude, it wasn't my intent. Also, I'm sorry for not being constructive, I'll try not and e-mail during rush our in the future :-)
About a more wide spread flora of security references. My thought was that the more known universities around the world must have written kilometers of papers on Linux Security. Finding freely available papers describing general security on Linux was easier said than done. I found some references during a quick scan this evening.
I guess it's a matter of trust. Of course the US Government and the NSA has excellent and trustworthy security people, and that information in this subject is collaborative.. but at least I feel more secure seeing that it's not only the US Government and secret service that approves and advocates the security issues brought out in this security guide.
Universities: http://www.princeton.edu/~essweb/linux/linuxsecurity.html http://www.yale.edu/its/secure-computing/ http://www.yale.edu/its/security/sysadmin/server-guidelines.html http://www.yale.edu/its/security/network/unix.html http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/security/unix-box.html
Other: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Security-HOWTO/ http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Security-Quickstart-HOWTO/ http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Secure-Programs-HOWTO/open-source-security.html http://www.puschitz.com/SecuringLinux.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Security_Modules
Vendors: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/en-US/Security_G...
I'll try and find some more / better references as soon as I have some more free time.
//M
sn 2009-01-04 klockan 12:00 -0500 skrev Message: 8 Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 09:44:55 -0500 From: "Paul W. Frields" stickster@gmail.com Subject: Re: PATCH[1/1] Linux Security Guide To: fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 20090104144455.GB18821@localhost.localdomain Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:07:16PM +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Magnus Glantz mg@hacka.net wrote:
My 5 as an non US citizen.
I do not feel comfortable with a guide that seems almost completely ripped off published US military/government documents.
I only looked at the English. I was not aware of the origins of the
content.
I will be more careful in future.
Thanks! :-)
"Ripped off" seems unnecessarily harsh to me, and incorrectly implies that somehow the content was lifted without permission, when in fact the references in question are freely available to everyone (USA domestic or foreign). The principles embodied in most of those references are fairly universal and you'll find them echoed in most high-level infosec materials. In fact, some foreign governments use these references themselves.
The Security Guide continues to be a collaborative, participatory project, so anyone who is unhappy with the content -- or completely satisfied, too, for that matter -- is free to get involved! :-) You could start by providing equivalent or comparable non-US references, for example.
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Message: 3 Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:12:20 +0530 From: Rahul Sundaram sundaram@fedoraproject.org Subject: curl instead of wget To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 49618FAC.30400@fedoraproject.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Hi,
In documentation, wherever we are using wget, it is probably better to use curl instead since wget is not installed by default on the Live CD while curl is. Just a thought.
Rahul
Message: 4 Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:01:54 +0200 From: Basil Mohamed Gohar abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org Subject: Re: curl instead of wget To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 1231131714.3714.7.camel@localhost.localdomain Content-Type: text/plain
On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 10:12 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi,
In documentation, wherever we are using wget, it is probably better to use curl instead since wget is not installed by default on the Live CD while curl is. Just a thought.
Rahul
I ran into this problem (missing wget) after installing from the F10 LiveCD, so I can relate. However, I've no experience with curl, and I must say, curl --help is somewhat intimidating. Is it as straightforward to use as wget, especially for someone that may be new (e.g., the majority of those using documentation on a new installation of Fedora)?
Basil Mohamed Gohar abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org www.basilgohar.com
Message: 5 Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 23:04:11 -0600 From: Ian Weller ianweller@gmail.com Subject: Re: curl instead of wget To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 20090105050411.GA3404@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 07:01:54AM +0200, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 10:12 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi,
In documentation, wherever we are using wget, it is probably better to use curl instead since wget is not installed by default on the Live CD while curl is. Just a thought.
Rahul
I ran into this problem (missing wget) after installing from the F10 LiveCD, so I can relate. However, I've no experience with curl, and I must say, curl --help is somewhat intimidating. Is it as straightforward to use as wget, especially for someone that may be new (e.g., the majority of those using documentation on a new installation of Fedora)?
Then shouldn't wget be installed by default?
-- Ian Weller ianweller@gmail.com http://ianweller.org GnuPG fingerprint: E51E 0517 7A92 70A2 4226 B050 87ED 7C97 EFA8 4A36 "Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet." ~ Douglas Adams
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
I agree, in part, with your overview. A completely secure system is one that is unplugged and that isn't exactly useful. I would dare say that you don't want the same level of security as I do or as anyone else might which is why it is important to give as much information as possible and let people pick and choose what they feel is important to their specific needs.
Case in point, admin A has a server in a cave that is physically highly protected. Disk encryption and securing single user mode might not be as important as securing the network connection. So that admin might only care about the VPN, SSH, IPTables, and related chapters and not so much on the LUKS Disk Encryption.
I feel that it is important to give admins and users as much information as possible so they can make an educated decision on mitigating their systems down to an acceptable level of risk. Users should know that their systems are NOT secure as soon as they install Fedora or any other operating system.
If we are missing something you think should be addressed please feel free to develop a chapter.
Thanks, Eric Christensen E-Mail: sparks@fedoraproject.org GPG Key: BD0C14C1
Magnus Glantz wrote:
This e-mail is about security and user friendliness, and how I think this guide perhaps may be modified into something better. This may also be me misunderstanding the purpose of this guide. Be aware.
I agree that Government Security Agencies and Banks has more to loose than a lot of other people :-)
Last night I couldn't get to sleep, due to my big mouth, so I thought a bit more about the security guide. I guess this guide aims to the users of Fedora. This may be a huuge misconception on my part, but, I though regular home users are the main users of Fedora. So.. this guide should perhaps to be focused on that kind of usage and that kind of knowledge levels.
My experience, working with security in highly secure government/telco environments is that security and ease of use/user friendliness is two most important main counter parts.
On one hand, it's "pretty easy" to make something extremely secure, but extremely secure systems is a total drag to be in
- because they are difficult to access, use and communicate to and from, due to all restrictions and security related administration.
I believe the standard Fedora user never would want such a system. In a system like that security has compromised to much user friendliness for it to be fun. If security isn't your definition of happy-happy joy-joy :-)
I had a thought that perhaps this guide should mainly not focus on different things that makes a system secure as a bank. Instead perhaps it should focus on covering techniques that allows ones home computer to operate in a secure _and_ user friendly manner.
Here's what I wrote on my phone last night, trying to kill demons of guilt and shame spawned out of my nonconstructive mail yesterday. I tried to sort them in order of positive impact on security weighed against user friendliness.
- Keep your system up-to-date.
1.1) Perhaps advocacy that users should prefer "Yum installed software", as it automatically will get updated via Yum. 2) Keep backups of your data. 2.1) Some easy ways of backing up data. Burn on CD/DVD, put on external storage, backup hard drive, etc. S/W recommendations. 3) Running a firewall. 3.1) Using the shipped Fedora firewall setup tools, enabling the firewall at install. 4) Use SE-Linux 5) Use common sense 5.1 Do not accept unknown stuff/software from unknown people. If a stranger walked up to you in real life and offered you an unidentifiable object.. and you at the same time constantly heard and read stories of people accepting unidentifiable objects from strangers - finding out the object was a bomb / robotic miniature robber - YOU WOULD RUN AWAY! 5) Do not run server software that you do not use (as web, mail, ftp, nfs or even a ssh server (if it's a desktop)) 6) Advanced topics - Here one may cover more "user unfriendly" stuff for the paranoid government spy user types :-) 6.1 Encryption of different kinds (files, file systems, e-mail, etc) 6.2 Advanced hardening techniques and tools. 6.3 Advanced auditing techniques and tools 6.4 Security policy and/or paranoid thinking
Some more links.
Organizations: http://www.cert.org/archive/pdf/aia-handbook.pdf http://www.first.org/resources/guides/ http://www.sans.org/reading_room/
//M
mån 2009-01-05 klockan 12:00 -0500
Message: 2 Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:23:45 -0500 From: Eric Christensen eric@christensenplace.us Subject: Re: PATCH[1/1] Linux Security Guide To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 49617D41.5040205@christensenplace.us Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Good resources. Thanks for sending them. My reasoning for building that part of the Security Guide based on US Government documents and not documents from Universities or commercial sources has a simple explanation. Government computers HAVE to be secure. I've seen way too many universities and businesses run a half-way security mindset. They are too interested in the bottom line than a secure system even though a secure system will help the bottom line in the long run.
The only other industry that I would like to pull from is the banking industry. They are generally notorious for their secure systems (I'm talking about the larger banks). They could stand to loose billions of dollars if they are "broken into". Of course most of the banks make their documentation secret as to not tip off anyone with a possible documented flaw.
I agree that we should be looking at multiple sources and that will come in time. Please feel free to add information into the guide. I'll be happy to read any patches that you, or anyone else, has to offer to the guide. If you have any specific interests, please let me know!
Thanks, Eric Christensen E-Mail: sparks@fedoraproject.org GPG Key: BD0C14C1
Magnus Glantz wrote:
I'm sorry if I came off a bit rude, it wasn't my intent. Also, I'm sorry for not being constructive, I'll try not and e-mail during rush our in the future :-)
About a more wide spread flora of security references. My thought was that the more known universities around the world must have written kilometers of papers on Linux Security. Finding freely available papers describing general security on Linux was easier said than done. I found some references during a quick scan this evening.
I guess it's a matter of trust. Of course the US Government and the NSA has excellent and trustworthy security people, and that information in this subject is collaborative.. but at least I feel more secure seeing that it's not only the US Government and secret service that approves and advocates the security issues brought out in this security guide.
Universities: http://www.princeton.edu/~essweb/linux/linuxsecurity.html http://www.yale.edu/its/secure-computing/ http://www.yale.edu/its/security/sysadmin/server-guidelines.html http://www.yale.edu/its/security/network/unix.html http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/security/unix-box.html
Other: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Security-HOWTO/ http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Security-Quickstart-HOWTO/ http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Secure-Programs-HOWTO/open-source-security.html http://www.puschitz.com/SecuringLinux.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Security_Modules
Vendors: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/en-US/Security_G...
I'll try and find some more / better references as soon as I have some more free time.
//M
sn 2009-01-04 klockan 12:00 -0500 skrev Message: 8 Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 09:44:55 -0500 From: "Paul W. Frields" stickster@gmail.com Subject: Re: PATCH[1/1] Linux Security Guide To: fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 20090104144455.GB18821@localhost.localdomain Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:07:16PM +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Magnus Glantz mg@hacka.net wrote:
My 5 as an non US citizen.
I do not feel comfortable with a guide that seems almost completely ripped off published US military/government documents.
I only looked at the English. I was not aware of the origins of the
content.
I will be more careful in future.
Thanks! :-)
"Ripped off" seems unnecessarily harsh to me, and incorrectly implies that somehow the content was lifted without permission, when in fact the references in question are freely available to everyone (USA domestic or foreign). The principles embodied in most of those references are fairly universal and you'll find them echoed in most high-level infosec materials. In fact, some foreign governments use these references themselves.
The Security Guide continues to be a collaborative, participatory project, so anyone who is unhappy with the content -- or completely satisfied, too, for that matter -- is free to get involved! :-) You could start by providing equivalent or comparable non-US references, for example.
- ------------------------------
Message: 3 Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:12:20 +0530 From: Rahul Sundaram sundaram@fedoraproject.org Subject: curl instead of wget To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 49618FAC.30400@fedoraproject.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Hi,
In documentation, wherever we are using wget, it is probably better to use curl instead since wget is not installed by default on the Live CD while curl is. Just a thought.
Rahul
- ------------------------------
Message: 4 Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:01:54 +0200 From: Basil Mohamed Gohar abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org Subject: Re: curl instead of wget To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 1231131714.3714.7.camel@localhost.localdomain Content-Type: text/plain
On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 10:12 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi,
In documentation, wherever we are using wget, it is probably better to use curl instead since wget is not installed by default on the Live CD while curl is. Just a thought.
Rahul
I ran into this problem (missing wget) after installing from the F10 LiveCD, so I can relate. However, I've no experience with curl, and I must say, curl --help is somewhat intimidating. Is it as straightforward to use as wget, especially for someone that may be new (e.g., the majority of those using documentation on a new installation of Fedora)?
________________________________________________________________________
Basil Mohamed Gohar abu_hurayrah@hidayahonline.org www.basilgohar.com
- ------------------------------
Message: 5 Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 23:04:11 -0600 From: Ian Weller ianweller@gmail.com Subject: Re: curl instead of wget To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Message-ID: 20090105050411.GA3404@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 07:01:54AM +0200, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 10:12 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi,
In documentation, wherever we are using wget, it is probably better to use curl instead since wget is not installed by default on the Live CD while curl is. Just a thought.
Rahul
I ran into this problem (missing wget) after installing from the F10 LiveCD, so I can relate. However, I've no experience with curl, and I must say, curl --help is somewhat intimidating. Is it as straightforward to use as wget, especially for someone that may be new (e.g., the majority of those using documentation on a new installation of Fedora)?
Then shouldn't wget be installed by default?
- -- Ian Weller ianweller@gmail.com http://ianweller.org GnuPG fingerprint: E51E 0517 7A92 70A2 4226 B050 87ED 7C97 EFA8 4A36 "Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet." ~ Douglas Adams -
On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:24:36PM -0500, Eric Christensen wrote:
If we are missing something you think should be addressed please feel free to develop a chapter.
When Eric discussed the scope of the Security Guide with us on IRC, this was before the Red Hat content was released and available as an upstream to draw from.
However, we agreed then and later that it was a good idea to ...
* Include a wide range of security needs in the 'Security Guide'
* Make sure it was applicable to the "average desktop user", the "average system administrator", and the "average highly secure environment paranoid-for-good-reason professional."
(Eric, is that a fair assessment of the scope?)
That is a challenge, but a good one.
We can always take the larger upstream content and draw more than one Fedora-focused guide from it, for example ...
* Fedora Home User Security Guide * Fedora Secure Datacenter Guide * Etc.
By putting all the content in to one upstream document, it is like the Linux kernel -- useful for many sizes of hardware and environments.
Fortunately, DocBook XML makes it relatively easy to construct new guides out of existing XML content by reorganizing and omitting.
- Karsten
docs@lists.stg.fedoraproject.org