Slashdot Mirror
Debian Hardened Aims For Security
larryg writes "Debian Hardened is a new project that wants be an official Debian sub-project. It aims to provide a complete tree of hardened kernel and software packages for a standard Debian distribution, without changing to another like Adamantix and making easy the hardening of any machine running Debian GNU/Linux. The hardened kernels use the grSecurity patch and some of the Adamantix kernel patches; also, its packages are compiled with the ProPolice/SSP gcc extension and some libraries to prevent and trace buffer overflow attacks. Also, and as a second project, we are working on some enhacements against the Linux Entropy Pool engine, using an external TRNG (True Random Numbers Generator) device which uses thermal noise and also the atomic decay from a Geiger counter, making true unpredictable random numbers."
Cant wait to use it with my Lexar JumpDrive loaded with security sofware against hackers.
Doesn't provide as many choices or the technological /security understanding of Hardened Gentoo
(not to mention the very similar name)
http://hardened.gentoo.org
How is this going to be different than just installing Woody and applying the lids kernel patch to your particular kernel and locking the system down that way?
why would you need a distro for securing your machine? you should just secure your favorite distro yourself :)
Why not just get Windows XP; I mean, didn't you guys hear MS when they said they were focusing on security now???
I farted
Hard3n y0ur Debian/w0ody t0day!
Being a slackware guy myself, I still would very much like to inspect this branch when released....
I still think the less you have the more secure it is.... as long as what you have isnt bloated. Thats why in my opinion slackware is great on security.
So if this thing is more than one iso image ill be rather skeptical since debian tends to be a very large distro...
Sometimes the majority just means all the morons are on the same side.
Debian's team can implement it a certain way and whatever amazing thing they cook-up can be re-used by the Gentoo team!
The goal is not a religious war, the goal is for you and I to get ahead.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
IF it results in many of the security features that make Debian (and GNU/Linux in general) hard to use being moved over to a specially oriented project, and removed from the main one.
For example, if you are setting up a single user box to access the internet with a modem (something that GNU/Linux should shine at) you often run into problems related to pppd requiring all sorts of obnoxious nonsense to get it to run as a regular user.
Policies such as new accounts having their own group by default, and not being readable by all other accounts, make sense in the ISP, server, and in business settings in general. But tipping point is being reached, to where soon most people setting up Debian are setting it up to use it at home, not to run a business or train themselves to get business related job skills. Things like pam have to go to where they belong, and not get in the way of the rest of us.
Has anyone ever,ever,ever compromised a computer or encrypted document by predicting the output of a random number generator?
Would the time not be better spent looking for the next OpenSSH/SSL hole?
I'm not trolling, most security flaws come from everyday apps rather than esoteric problems.
Wanna mount my hardened woody?
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Debian could use that as a spam headline!:
Hard3n y0ur Debian/w0ody t0day!
That was funny. C'mon, laugh.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
I liked this back when Gentoo did it, and I think this is a great trend; having a completely security minded Linux OS (since BSD has been there forever ;))
personally I'm really interested in the Security-Enhanced Linux that the NSA is working on. To have something that complete is really intriquing. Now if they don't have something like apt to keep it steady I dunno...but you have to admit it's got 'wow' factor written all over it!
BCDFY^&D&S^F
free ipod and free gmail!
I'm a Hardened Gentoo user; although, I only use a subset of all the hardened herd's efforts :) I actually do understand what I'm doing, though, and am trying to spread that understanding myself. I am in no way affiliated with [Hardened] Gentoo or Debian.
At any rate, these people don't understand that they'll need more drastic changes. Why not bring attention to http://d-sbd.alioth.debian.org/ while you're at it? This is my project, just a demonstrational effort to bring these things to the attention of the Debian maintainers.
The idea isn't to have a hardened "Enhancement," but rather to incorporate anything you can put in that won't hurt. For example, you can compile glibc, gnome, and bash with SSP/ProPolice, and nothing else will use ProPolice but those. Those programs also won't be hurt by ProPolice. We can extend this to, "Compile any program or library that won't break with it with SSP." The user will never notice; but it'll stop a range of attacks.
My point is that you need to aim low. A hardened system like Hardened Gentoo or Adamantix will supply you with *everything* -- PaX, SSP, ET_DYN binaries, rediculously complicated MAC systems, firewalling maybe, network sniffers, etc. A non-hardened distribution should look at each of these, determine which don't change the end user's experience (administrator included), and implement them. This is "Do what's easy" rather than "Do EVERYTHING we possibly can," but it's still better than just being lame in the area of security.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Take for example the fact that I can remotely shutdown a debiaTake for example the fact that I can remotely shutdown a debian machine over ssh with the "halt" command. A RedHat distro had that little feature blocked
Why exactly is this a bad thing? Have you never had to shutdown or reboot a remote server? I know I've had to do both at least a few times... Although rebooting would be much more common, and it would probably be safer as well :p.
On my Debian machines you seem to need to be root to do it. If someone I don't know is logged in over ssh as root on one of my boxes the last thing I am worried about is his ability to shut it down :p.
Updated link: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian- howto/
First off, who are these guys?
Debian already has a security project, a few of them actually.
I looked at google for either of these guys names and unless I am mistaken, this is what I got: developer one and developer two.
Interesting that anyone else that they haven't ever used those names to contribute to say at least a single debian security mailing list, or say ANY debian lists?
Even more interesting is that they don't seem to have much but a slashdot plug and they are accepting donations.
I am not impressed. Working with the debian security team is the way to go.
Steve Kemp is one of the main guys heading up the debian audit project, these guys should be working with him. Not for some other project.
The official debian project for this is the debian audit project.
Hell advertising that they use SSP enabled GCC! Steve makes those packages for use with debian already!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
The crap about Geiger counters seems to indicate the author seems more interested in studly buzzwords than actually developing practical solutions. A soundcard with nothing plugged in is a perfectly acceptable source of entropy, the problem is just in accurately estimating the rate. Also, many chipsets and an increasing number of CPUs include hardware random number generators which can be used too.
I'm curious as to why they chose the particular tools they did. I don't know too much about these issues, but from what I understand the NSA's selinux patches are a very robust and powerful set of tools. IIRC Redhat has been integrating it into their systems. It may be that this isn't the best choice, but I'd be curious if someone who knows them well could give us a rundown of why some solutions might be better/worse.
One issue with selinux I (think) I understand is that in order for applications to run properly you need to have predefined rules which allow them to do what they need to do (the nature of MAC is they can't do anything except what is explicitly allowed, as I understand it). This is possible for servers, which do only a few jobs repeatedly, but for a desktop machine with hundreds of potential applications to fire up and more being developed such a burden becomes huge. A normal user would end up turning off MAC in order to use the computer the way they want to, unless each application they want or may want to use already has a default ruleset present. I would be really happy to see this happen - various distributions collaborate on default rules for large numbers of applications, so end users could actually use systems that are seriously hardened. I know it's probably overkill, but given what casual Windows users on the network have done over the years (as well as unsecured Linux boxes and other OSes, for that matter) I think if some combination of projects could deliver a usable desktop machine with mandatory access control and any other features which might defend their box while letting it be useful would be a Very Good Thing. One thing is for sure - too little security does more harm to the internet community than having more protection than you need.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
how is Hardened Debian going to be different from installing the harden* packages?
I think you misunderstood. I meant that users get shafted with there are just a few large companies competing, but it is better to have lots of smaller organizations writing FOSS. For most users, the advances in FOSS haven't affected them in the past few years. OSS projects like firefox and gaim are starting to become popular for the every day folk and that's the advantage to the consumer I was referring too.
At the risk of the post sounding like a discussion at a head-lice convention, everyone has their own personal itch to scratch.
h tml
Several posts thus far, have questioned the viability of establishing yet another secure-debian project, similar to other existing projects, and have indicated that there would be a better use of available resources if everyone would just get along and work together (or at least, form under a single project). Fair enough.
However, there are a whole range of reasons why diversity and natural selection w.r.t many competing projects can provide benefits over and above a single large project - organisational inertia, effective and efficient communication, and development priority differences, for example.
'Organisational inertia' in particular, whereby the larger a organisation/project gets, the slower it can react to changing requirements, is a good reason why this effort-amalgamation can potentially be a bad thing.
Each of these projects probably has a slightly different 'itch' to 'scratch'. There's no reason why, later on down the track, that the best elements of each of these projects cannot be merged into something cohesive.
A good example is the current situation in Linux Auditing (as in C2/CAPP style auditing and event logging, not code verification) and host-based audit-related intrusion detection. Over time, we've had Snare (http://www.intersectalliance.com), SLES (http://www.suse.com), and Riks Audit Daemon (http://www.redhat.com). Each project had a slightly different focus, and each development team have come up with some great solutions to the problems of auditing / event logging.
The developers of each of these projects are now communicating and collaborating, with a view to bringing a effective audit subsystem to Linux that incorporates the best ideas from each approach.
BTW: How about auditing in this project? Here's a starting point:
http://www.gweep.net/~malk/snare_debian.s
Red. (Snare Developer)
Does anyone have evidence where a system was cracked due to the lack of entropy from things like interrupt timing?
I would think that there exists a limited number of people in the world who could exploit a diffie-helman exchange between systems using the usual sources of randomness on an x86 machine.
I can imagine the newest spams: get your Woody hardened now...
Does this count?
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Being able to remotely shutdown or halt a machine is a godsend. The trick is to restrict SSH access-in from certain 'secure' IP addresses, and firewall the rest of them out. Secondly, I guess only allow root access from a non-root account (ie: no ssh'ing in as root).
:)
But I guess to each their own
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...."
Nimheil
but seriously... as a debian user, i fully condone harder, faster, and stronger debians.
No, in that case they did not use any random data (or "salt" as cryptographers call it) in the encoding at all.
The problem was not the quality of the random number generation.
Definitely. There was a gambling agency that people ripped alot of money off from other people cause they seeded the generator with the amount of milliseconds since midnight and used a public lookup table to generate the random number. Not only is this a stupid way of doing it - it's only security through obscurity cause you only need a few queries to syncronise your clock with the agency's clock, but the idiots actually published their code!!!
Now consider this example - random number generators are anything but secure.
It seems Quantum Mechanics disagrees with you. Thank goodness, too. If every effect needed a cause, we'd be in a funny conundrum when considering the origins of the Universe, wouldn't we?
It rather reminds me of St. Thomas Aquinas' proof of the existance of God using the logic of the unmoved mover (that as all things have cause, there must exist one seed without cause to begin the chain, and that seed is God). This mostly seems like bunk, today, what with the fact that cause can follow effect, Quantum Mechanics exhibits truly random behaviour, etc, etc.
Security is like an erection: it can always be harder and longer lasting. That doesn't necessarily imply impotence (unless it comes from the aptly named Microsoft, haha).
If someone I don't know is logged in over ssh as root on one of my boxes the last thing I am worried about is his ability to shut it down
Actually, if someone I don't know is logged into my system as root, I'd prefer they simply shut the machine down. Then they can't do any (more) damage...
You try to make a joke with that and you don't bring in "Woody". Weak.
I call mine "Sarge".
My distro, I mean.
It might surprise some linux fanbois, but other OSs are better suited than their beloved linux for certain tasks.
Who says you shouldn't run X on a server? Just make sure you have -nolisten tcp in the server setup. And for good measure, block the ports it uses.
http://catlin.casinocitytimes.com/articles/1243.ht ml
Someone once beat Keno 3 times in a row and won $620,000 by figuring out a weakness in the 'randomly' generated numbers.
Sometimes I get a feeling saying that people spend too much time thinking about security in the OSS world. Security is important, but as mentioned earlier, has a system's security for example ever been compromised because of insecure random number generation?
It's just like the VPN softwares around. Take for example IPsec/FreeSWAN and OpenVPN. OpenVPN offers great security using SSL and TLS. Both those protocols are in the present time considered secure and it's fairly simple to setup.
IPsec on the other hand, takes the concept of security to a whole new level. This affects the overall software, turning it into a pain to set up and understand. And in order to make full use of the security you have to understand how it works.
I bet many security issues arises out of misconfiguration due to unnecessary complexity in the software. Keep it simple stupid is the way to go.
My point is: isn't secure security enough? Does it have to be better?
Which is the default in Debian.