Marian Marinov wrote:
On Friday 24 October 2008 20:15:10 Leif Nixon wrote:
"B. Vincent Diepeveen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Now you post here a big story on how your Rocks got hacked. Do i
conclude it correctly the
problem is that you ran a default Rocks kernel?
The basic problem seems to be bad account hygiene.
That's a hard problem. Users will forever be borrowing each other's
accounts, making it difficult to contain security breaches.
But if you build a good infrastructure jailing the users within one directory
with access to files that do not affect the underlaing OS you will have
better chance of leaving such attacks out of your systems.
Well, there has been a discussion in the past about using chroot jails
for security. My current understanding after following these threads a
year or more ago, is that chroot jails are not, in fact, designed with
security in mind, and shouldn't be relied upon as a security feature.
In fact, there were some chroot tunneling exploits posted a while ago
that suggest that chroot for security may be as much security theatre as
hard-to-guess-say-speak passwords.
A scheme like that is when all of your users are chrooted to their home
folders with the OS for each user mounted from a read-only image. This way it
becomes harder for attackers to penetrate the OS security.
Harder, possibly. Impossible? no.
Also a good security addition will be adding SELinux, RSBAC or GRSecurity to
the kernel and actually using any of these.
SElinux has been annoying, even overtly frustrating to use.
The things that bother me are there appear to be real things you can do
to secure systems (layers), and there is security theatre. Sadly, most
people happily talk about security theatre as if it were real security.
The best statement I have heard about security is that it is a process,
not a feature/function. You can't add more security by adding a
product. You can by changing they way something is used.
We are in the process of altering how this user uses their cluster. In
doing so, we are disabling a number of attack vectors. Does this make
their machine more secure? No. It is important to understand, that
closing some doors may leave other hidden ones open. So what we try to
do is create layers such that in the event we screw up, the damage is
contained.
Regards
Marian Marinov
Head of System Operations at Siteground.com
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
