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Red Hat Seeks to Deliver Most Secure Linux
Jack writes "ITO is running a story on Red Hat's plan to become the most secure Linux platform. From the article: "Red Hat officially joined The National Information Assurance Partnership to bring an improved level of security and assurance to Linux. This means that the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will contain kernel and Security Enhanced Linux policy enhancements, developed by IBM, Red Hat, TCS, NSA and the community.""
First off, I should let it be known that I am a BSD fan, and not a Linux one. However, despite my many issues with Red Hat and Fedora Core, they have been integrating some really cool stuff of late, things I had wanted to have easy access to in a open source operating system for some time, such as the SELinux functionality.
It's absolutely fantastic work they are doing; making SELinux a default in their systems in meaningful ways, while at the same time, doing their damndest to make it as transparent as possible to the everyday user. No one else is doing that. OpenBSD are the kings of UNIX quality control, but they offer nothing in the way of mandatory access controls. FreeBSD has comparable technology in the form of the TrustedBSD MAC Framework (which is excelant), but they are not yet offering security policies that are transparent to ordinary users of the system, and like SELinux in most distributions that support it, it's a pain to set up correctly.
Now if only they (Fedora especially) would ship a basic "desktop install" on *one* CD image instead of requiring 2-4 CDs, my major gripes with their software would go away completely. This kind of hardcore but transparent security is most definately needed by everybody today, and right now, only Red Hat and the Fedora Project are providing it. As much as I prefer the saner development methodologies and more well thought out kernel architectures provided by the various BSDs, in an online world as inherrently dangerous as our own, employing an operating system that supports these security technologies is the only real way to go.
Come on FreeBSD! What are you waiting for? Keep up the (mostly) good work Fedora people!
There are already a number of quality server distributions out there with security tools like SELinux, GRSecurity and PaX, but it will be interesting to see Redhat contribute to the mix. Personally, I use a number of modified Redhat patches while building HLFS-based systems.
While this is undoubtedly off-topic, what I really want to see (and continually try to create) is a desktop system with some of these advanced security concepts enabled. The problem seems to be finding the right balance between security and ease-of-use, it's a lot easier to create a server with non-standard access control than an xorg/KDE desktop.
Contributing to this problem (at least in my experience) are the documentation problems. These can occur in many opensource projects but seem to be magnified in security projects. Even with a fair working knowledge of relevant areas, incomplete and esoteric documentation provides a stumbling block for a lot of us.
Sure you can do it. Samba and Apache just have to be part of the same security domain. Study up, boy.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Where I work, it's a Windows/Novell shop. The director doesn't care about security nearly as much as usability. Is that wrong? Hell yes, but that's how it is. Security is our responsibility (not his), and when he's choosing products, he goes for usability. He only recently allowed us to test some SuSE boxes because a) they were endorsed by Novell, and b) he liked YaST. He wanted to understand what we are doing to the boxes. Command line is evil to him, as is anything "open source" or free as in beer (free as in speech means nothing to him)). If it doesn't cost a lot of money and doesn't have an "easy" interface, it's inferior.
SELinux is a great idea but really complex to the point of obscurity. I couldn't come up on my own policy rules for SELinux to make Samba run in a more secure manner. I am the first to agree OpenBSD is the king of secure policy but really bites at allowing an administrator to manipulate them. This is where RH comes in and does very well with their push into SELinux. It is sufficiently complex but in most cases the way RH uses SELinux the user never notices.
Ever since they've introduced SELinux in the default install they've claimed it is incomplete but are adding rules every chance they get. And even better, there is nearly transparent to the "uninterested user". There is a seperate SELinux package that merges in every time they update it so my interaction (and the chance for me to break it) is minimized. And I'm constantly surprised by the settings they do work out as well (for instance some of their Samba settings are really good security policy anyway).
Red Hat's support for things like SELinux is stellar but it needs to be better and they are the first admit it needs more work. Isn't this what Open Source is all about?
Knowing my machines are bulletproof is great, and all, but if one of my users is deliberately doing something s/he shouldn't, I want to know about it!
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe