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Linux Security Week: July 28th, 2008
Source: LinuxSecurity.com Contributors - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include "Network Security Toolkit Distribution Aids Network Security Administrators," "Encrypt The System Manually Upon Installation," and "Critical Security Issues Found in the Spring Framework."
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Feature Extras:
Security Features of Firefox 3.0 - Lets take a look at the security features of the newly released Firefox 3.0. Since it's release on Tuesday I have been testing it out to see how the new security enhancements work and help in increase user browsing security. One of the exciting improvements for me was how Firefox handles SSL secured web sites while browsing the Internet. There are also many other security features that this article will look at. For example, improved plugin and addon security.
Read on for more security features of Firefox 3.0.
Review: The Book of Wireless - "The Book of Wireless" by John Ross is an answer to the problem of learning about wireless networking. With the wide spread use of Wireless networks today anyone with a computer should at least know the basics of wireless. Also, with the wireless networking, users need to know how to protect themselves from wireless networking attacks.
Thank you for reading the LinuxSecurity.com
weekly security newsletter. The purpose of this document is to provide our readers
with a quick summary of each week's most relevant Linux security headline.
EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.19 Now Available! (Apr 15)
Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.19 (Version 3.0, Release 19). This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes and some feature enhancements to the EnGarde Secure Linux Installer and the SELinux policy.
Linux Tool Speeds up Computer Forensics for Cops (Jul 25)
Australian university students have developed a Linux-based data forensics tool to help police churn through a growing backlog of computer-related criminal investigations. The tool was developed by students from Edith Cowan University's School of Computing and Information Sciences and will help the Western Australian Police Computer Crime Squad process their forensic investigations. Called Simple (for Simple Image Preview Live Environment), the software allows investigators to view and acquire forensic data at the scene of the crime without compromising the integrity of data as it is collected.
There are tons of Linux forensics LiveCD distributions available, but what is your favorite?
Mozilla Messaging patched nine security vulnerabilities in Thunderbird Wednesday, the first time it's plugged holes in the e-mail software since early May. The bug patched in Thunderbird Wednesday that was fixed in Firefox last week was in the browser rendering engine's CSSValue array data structure. According to Mozilla, the vulnerability could be used by hackers to force a crash, and from there, run malicious code. Several other just-patched Thunderbird vulnerabilities could also be used by attackers to execute code remotely.
Are you in a rush to update your installation of Thunderbird with news that nine security vulnerabilities were found and patched on Wednesday?
Network Security Toolkit Distribution Aids Network Security Administrators (Jul 24)
Network Security Toolkit is one of many live CD Linux distributions focusing on network monitoring, analysis, and security. NST was designed to give network security administrators easy access to a comprehensive set of open source network applications, many of which are among the top 100 security tools recommended by insecure.org. NST's latest version, 1.8.0, was released last month. You can download NST as a live CD ISO or as a VMware virtual machine from the author's site.
Have you ever used a Live CD which is designed to be used for network monitoring? If so, do you have any favorites? This article likes at one Live CD distro called "Network Security Toolkit".
HOWTO: Encrypt The System Manually Upon Installation (Jul 23)
Another howto by me concerning encryption. However this one will be pretty intense on graphics. I have a step-by-step guide on how to do a manual full encryption of the system. Due to a bug current in the ubuntu installation, you cannot encrypt the swap partition directly during the manual install. The install will just hang. Here's a link to the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/231451
This article is a step by step guide to do a full encryption of a Linux system. The author provides snapshots in showing you how to do this.
NSA takes its Flask architecture to the open-source community to offer an inexpensive route to trusted systems.Architecture created by the National Security Agency and expanded with help from the open-source community will save the Defense Department and intelligence agencies millions in hardware costs. With Flask, "we can guarantee that high-integrity data can't be corrupted by untrustworthy entities or that sensitive data doesn't leak to untrustworthy entities," said Stephen Smalley, one of the chief developers of Flask at NSA. The best part is that the technology requires no specialized hardware or operating system.
What do you think about the Flask architecture? This article looks at this security architecture and how SELinux came about from it and it's impact on open source security.
Security Guide for VMware ESX: Helpful But Has Holes (Jul 22)
With security becoming ever more important, I've been reviewing the various guides available to harden the VMware Virtual Infrastructure. So far the results have been disappointing, though I've looked at the CISecurity VMware ESX Benchmark and the VMware VI3 Hardening Guidelines. Now for the US Government's Defense Information Systems Agency's Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)-a long-awaited document that all levels of the U.S. government will follow to harden and protect their VMware VI3 installations.
At first look at VM security you might think it's just like securing any hardware install OS. However, VM security come with it's own set of challenges. This likes at the security issues with hardening VMware ESX.
Gibraltar Firewall 2.6, a Linux firewall distribution based on Debian, was launched yesterday as announced by Rene Mayrhofer. This will be the last release that will use the Linux kernel 2.4, as the next Gibraltar editions will use the 2.6 kernel. Among other things, this edition of Gibraltar offers improved traffic shaping performance (the iptables marking rules were re-ordered and the pre-defined traffic classes were improved), and allows SSL Explorer plugins to be installed.
Have you ever used the Gibraltar Firewall? Gibraltar provides the user with a web interface for setting up their firewall. Now it's available for the Linux 2.6 kernel. Also in this release they added full WLAN access point functionality.
Critical Security Issues Found in the Spring Framework (Jul 21)
A recent security assessment of an application by Ounce Labs has resulted in the discovery of two vulnerabilities that can affect Java Web applications that use the Spring Framework. Spring has been downloaded more than 5 million times to date, which means the security vulnerabilities identified could affect countless companies that use this framework."One of the problems is there's no default checking to make sure the users are only submitting fields that are visible in the form," Berg said. "That means someone can submit additional data in a request and put it into the Java bean."
"The vulnerabilities are not flaws [in the framework]. The issue is developers not understanding the complexity of the framework they're using." Ryan Berg Chief scientist, co-founder, Ounce Labs. So is this a security flaw in the framework or how developers are using it?
