Author: Michael D. Bauer
ISBN:
Publisher: O'Reilly
Reviewed by: Roger Burton West
Summary: An excellent resource for the Linux administrator concerned with security.
This book is a comprehensive guide to Linux security. While many books deal with installation and setup of a basic server system, they tend to be lacking in any security consideration, preferring to emphasise ease of use; this is the requisite companion volume to those, assuming a basic competence in Linux use and concentrating on security concerns.
Throughout the book, the author emphasises that systems fail: the existence of a firewall doesn't entirely prevent attacks on systems within it, proxies can be subverted, and so on. This leads him to a preferred position of robust defence in depth.
Although the book is copyrighted 2003, its history is in a series of columns written by the author for _Linux Journal_; in places it is significantly outdated, for example considering Debian release 2.2 as the most recent version even though 3.0 was released in July 2002.
The book opens with a consideration of risk. Since there is no such thing as a perfectly secure system, against whom should one attempt to protect it, and with what level of resource will it be attacked? Obviously there are no quick answers, but the author provides a set of tools with which reasonable estimates can be made.
The next chapter deals with perimeter networks: how to position firewalls and routers to reach a useful compromise between accessibility and security. Various types of firewall are considered, including commercial hardware-based products; this book is a rare example of work by an author whose expertise is primarily in open-source systems but who is also familiar with current commercial software.
The book now starts to go into rather more detail, as it describes the process of hardening a Linux server; the basics of this are as they have been described for a long time (run only necessary software, keep up to date, read the security mailing list for your chosen distribution), but the author expands usefully on all these concepts. This is one of the more basic chapters, but even the experienced administrator can usefully refresh and expand his knowledge. This chapter also covers security scanning with nmap and Nessus, as well as the Bastille Linux automated hardening system.
Remote administration tools are the concern of the next chapter, starting with ssh (the author rightly deprecates telnet and related clear-text administration tools) in some details, then briefly coverying sudo. Next is SSL tunnelling with stunnel, probably the most convenient of the programs available, including its client-certificate authentication mode (probably the trickiest part of stunnel to set up).
The next four chapters deal with the security of specific applications, starting with DNS. Remarkably, the author is prepared to mention the existence of djbdns as well as bind, and gives it a substantial amount of space; this is one of very few descriptions of djbdns in print, and would deserve attention for that even if it were not rather more clearly written than the official documentation. Next comes email, with a long general section (mostly considering unauthorised relaying) and detail on two specific mail transport agents, sendmail (because of its popularity) and postfix (because of the author's admitted bias in its favour). It is unfortunate that no room could be found for exim or qmail as well, as this would have provided coverage of the vast majority of SMTP servers deployed on Linux platforms.
The web services chapter only covers Apache, which is perhaps a pardonable failing given its preponderance on Internet-connected hosts, though some coverage of the many lighter-weight servers would have been welcome; it also covers CGI script and authentication security, though not in any great depth (these are more properly the province of the developer than of the system administrator in any case). The final application chapter, on file services, describes ProFTPD in some detail with some limited consideration of sftp and rsync.
The book's final section returns to the business of system, rather than application, administration, with consideration of intrusion detection. One chapter covers inbuilt systems for this (syslog and its ramifications including remote loggin, syslog-ng, and the automated log-watcher swatch); the other deals with external monitoring packages such as tripwire (and some of its kin) and snort. An appendix gives pre-built iptables firewall scripts.
The book is rather shorter than some other security handbooks on the market, and more space could perhaps have been given to alternative application software, particuarly for email and web services (and client mail protocols such as POP3 and IMAP are not even considered). Moreover, a slightly expanded treatment of networking - covering security under N:N masquerading rather than the simple N:1 described here and in a hundred existing articles - would have added significantly to the value of the book.
The quality of the prose is good and clear throughout, and examples are generous though not excessive. In summary, this is a book that I should recommend to anyone running a Linux server in an environment where not all potential users are fully trusted.