Words From Bastille Developer Jay Beale

How secure do you feel? Occams Razor points to "A great interview with [Jay Beale,] the Lead developer, about the Linux Bastille project." Beale talks about the direction that Bastille has taken, and seems fairly pragmatic about the Linux security model and computer security in general. A nugget: "... to fully secure a system, you really have to grind it into dust, scatter the pieces to the wind, and hope that Entropy does [its] part. Since you can't do this, you make tradeoffs."

Comments

Bastille gripes...

[Zagadka]

I installe Bastille a few days ago. It's a great idea... a security "hardener" for Linux. There are a few things about it that kind of bugged me though.

On thing that bugged me is the fact that it doesn't make it easy for you to choose what kind of security you're really looking for. For example, all I'm really concerned with on my home machine is network security. I don't want people connecting from a remote location and doing nasty things. On the other hand, I don't care about people who have physical access to the machine, because I have physical security to prevent that. Bastille ended up chmod'ing a bunch of executables so only root could use them. This ended up breaking numerous things, including the Helix updater. I couldn't even run ifconfig as a normal user after running Bastille. At least it generates pretty thorough logs, so I was able to undo the "damage".

The other thing is that it doesn't do any checks of what's turned on in your kernel. I was pretty sure I didn't have the firewall support compiled in, so I was pretty surprised that Bastille didn't complain. Some investigation showed that the scripts it installed to secure the network connection were all failing because of this. This is especially dangerous, because without actively checking, some users will think their system has been secured when it really isn't.

Over time, I'm sure Bastille will get better. In the meantime there are some quirks though, so be careful.

Dont Forget About the Most Neglected Security Type

[Sir_Winston]

I'm always disappointed that there's not a greater effort to provide data security through an easy-to-implement optional encrypted file system. Yes, you can get the patch from Kerneli.org to accomplish this, but this really isn't enough. The first line in the Howto on kerneli is: "This process requires the kernel source code, knowledge of compiling this code, and a lot of patience."

There should be a distribution--and maybe there is, can anyone point us to it?--which offers the encrypting file system as an option during install. Most of the install process for the more friendly distros already have all the install options laid out in fairly easy-to-use dialogs and what not, but it would go a long way toward insuring privacy if an encrypting file system were a standard install option in a big distro. With relaxation of crypto export regulations, it's becoming increasingly possible for the big US Linux companies to do this, and of course most non-US distros could have been doing it already.

The fact is, most *nix OSes are already much more secure from cracking exploits and viruses than Windows can ever dream of being; something like Bastille is just icing on the cake. But the next step in security, and in ensuring our privacy, is having an encrypted file system as an option in widely used distros, or in widely used/easy to apply add-on products. A standard complaint when someone suggests this is the increased overhead--but with modern microprocessors, the overhead is barely noticeable--I'd know because I use encrypted file systems in Windows on a measly old K6-2 400, with overhead barely visible at all. Just try using an efs on a processor made in the last 2 years, and you'll see it's pretty snappy. Running programs from encrypted drives does sometimes have noticeable, but not deadly, overhead, but accessing data stored on those drives (logs, writings, multimedia files, etc.) is hardly slower than accessing it on non-encrypted drives. And this is my experience under Windows, I can only imagine that under Linux performance would be far superior.

Just an attempt to point out that there's more than one issue in security; securing from crackers is far more well addressed, in almost all operating environments, than security for stored data. These days the U.S. and U.K. governments, and many others, are cracking down on expression of unpopular ideas and distribution of IP-infringing source and executables, and if they come to search your computer and find an encrypted file system, you're better off than if they find that copy of a DeCSS sort of proggie you wrote, or that article you thought you published anonymously but they managed to trace back to you, or the opinion you expressed about a company which has now decided to sue you for libel, or that copy of the webpage you uploaded which calls school officials and classmates the misguided bastards they really are.