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Linux Security: Reflections on 2002, Eye on 2003

Posted by timothy on from the bolting-the-doors-helps dept.

Mirko Zorz writes "Here are the reflections on Linux security in 2002 and predictions for 2003 by Bob Toxen, one of the 162 recognized developers of Berkeley UNIX and author of the acclaimed book "Real World Linux Security" already in its 2nd edition. Read more at Help Net Security."

6 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Real World Computer Security by SuperDuG · · Score: 4, Informative
    Who cares who has "dirtier" dirty water. Hell parts of Ol Miss can't even keep fish alive in it. There is a twang of high radition in some areas. And lets not even get into the amount of chemicals that are used to kill things (bacteria, insects, weeds, etc.) and then there's the industry and sewage run off in it.

    It's hard to believe that something in the wonderful utopia of wonderfulness which is America can have something so dirty running right down the middle of it.

    You think it's so clean?? I'll getcha a glass, and we'll see if you want to drink it, considering how "Clean" it is.

    --
    Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
  2. Re:Talking about Linux security... by fungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    ERRATA:

    --- begin cut & paste ---

    To: BugTraq
    Subject: Re: OPENSSH REMOTE ROOT COMPROMISE ALL VERSIONS
    Date: Jan 6 2003 8:05PM
    Author: Global InterSec Research
    Message-ID:
    In-Reply-To:

    As some may have gathered, the advisory recently posted by mmhs@hushmail.com
    was indeed a fake, intended to highlight several unclear statements made in GIS2002062801.

    The advisory in question is currently being updated with more detailed information and will
    be
    re-posted at: http://www.globalintersec.com/adv/openssh-20020628 01.txt as soon as it becomes

    available.

    Note that the kbd-init flaw described in GIS2002062801 was proven to be exploitable in our lab
    although not all evidence to demonstrate this was provided in the original advisory. A mistake
    was made in the original advisory draft, where chunk content data was shown, rather than the
    entire corrupted malloc chunk. This will be amended in the revision.

    Also note that to our knowledge there are currently no known, exploitable flaws in OpenSSH 3.5p1,

    due to its use of PAM as suggested by mmhs@hushmail.com. It is almost certain that the posted
    bogus advisory was also intended to cause alarm amongst communities using OpenSSH, through
    miss-information.

    Global InterSec LLC.

    --- end cut & paste ---

    The original advisory I was talking about can be found here.

    Sorry for misguiding you, humble slashdot readers.

  3. Honeypots are awesome. by tkoney · · Score: 5, Informative
    I had a very hard time convincing my manager to allow us to set up a honeypot on our DMZ. He said since no one could get there, what was the point. Three weeks later, when a hacker managed to break in via some badly written ASP programs (not my fault) it was the honeypot that send us the alerts that let us get him off our network.

    Of course honeypots can also be used to learn what hackers do. The Honeynet Project is a great place to go to learn how to set one up securely so it can't be used to attack other people.

    In fact, today a new version of honeyd was released:

    As many of you already know, Honeyd is an OpenSource honeypot designed for the Unix platform. It has many featues, including the ability to monitor millions of IP addresses, detect activity on any UDP or TCP port, OS emulation at the user and kernel level, create virtual networks, and so on.

    Marcus Ranum and I are big fans of Honeyd. To make it easier for people to work with and understand this technology, we took all the necessary ingrediants together and 'cooked' them up for you, creating the Linux Honeyd Toolkit. This toolkit is a ready to go distribution of Honeyd, with statically precompiled binaries, configuration files, and startup scripts. The idea being you just update the honeyd.conf file to what you want your honeypot to look like and let her rip.

    Toxen's fear of Honeynets and Honeypots shows the "if I don't understand it, it's not good" theory I find in too many managers. He should take some time to run a honeypot or two and see how useful they can be.
  4. Re:Linux securty? Be more specific. Kernel | Userl by octogen · · Score: 4, Informative

    The userland software in question is: all of it.

    No, only suid binaries. You don't hack into something which runs in the context of your own account (your own level of access).

    Software that uses suid bit set will still be susceptible to leaving control to the "root" user after it crashes

    That's the difference between a secure configuration of common OSs like Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD,... and really secure OSs like VMS or Trusted Solaris (yes, Unix can be a really secure OS).

    Secure OSs don't run things as root, they assign privileges to certain users and/or binaries instead. For example, you don't want to allow Apache to override the Discretionary Access Control when it actually only needs 'root' to open port 80.

    On Trusted Solaris you just do 'setfpriv -m -a -f net_privaddr /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd' and noone would ever get something like root by hacking into your apache webserver.
    That's how the 'principle of least privilege' works.

    There is mainly one thing wich keeps your system secure: Access restrictions (users must not load kernel modules, mount disks, access files which they're not allowed to access, ...). But access restrictions can't protect your system from users/processes who are privileged to override these restrictions, and that's why you need fine grained privilege controls to build really secure OSs.

  5. Re:Talking about Linux security... by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 5, Informative

    You guys should know that a trivial remote root hole for SSH was released today on bugtraq.

    The posting appears to be a fake. (I wonder why your snake oil alerts didn't go off...)

  6. Wow. Another uneducated whitehat. by mcroot · · Score: 4, Informative

    Perhaps he should start by reading bugtraq. If he had, perhaps he would have seen this hole in ssh.com's lovely software in 2002.
    http://online.securityfocus.com/bid/6247

    Or, who can forget this unbeliavably idiotic mistake in their client from 2001
    http://online.securityfocus.com/bid/3078

    Yet he call's it more reliable that OpenSSH. Maybe he should look into the nice new privsep code in OpenSSH and comment on that. So called security experts make me wish public floggings were still a common event.