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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."
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.