Get the LinuxSecurity news you want faster with RSS
Powered By
Linux Security Week: August 25th, 2008
Source: LinuxSecurity.com - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas
This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include "A DIY Project for Network Security," "Open Vulnerability Assessment System," and "New SELinux Userland Project Site."
Linux+DVD
Magazine Our magazine is read by professional network and database administrators,
system programmers, webmasters and all those who believe in the power of Open
Source software. The majority of our readers is between 15 and 40 years old.
They are interested in current news from the Linux world, upcoming projects
etc.
In each issue you can find information concerning typical use of Linux: safety,
databases, multimedia, scientific tools, entertainment, programming, e-mail,
news and desktop environments.
LinuxSecurity.com
Feature Extras:
Review: Hacking Exposed Linux, Third Edition - "Hacking Exposed Linux" by ISECOM (Institute for Security and Open Methodologies) is a guide to help you secure your Linux environment. This book does not only help improve your security it looks at why you should. It does this by showing examples of real attacks and rates the importance of protecting yourself from being a victim of each type of attack.
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.
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 3.0.20 Now Available (Aug 19)
Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.20 (Version 3.0, Release 20). This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes and some feature enhancements to the EnGarde Secure Linux Installer and the SELinux policy.
In distribution since 2001, EnGarde Secure Community was one of the very first security platforms developed entirely from open source, and has been engineered from the ground-up to provide users and organizations with complete, secure Web functionality, DNS, database, e-mail security and even e-commerce.
In our conversations, we spoke to Sam Lamonica, CIO of Rudolph and Sletten Construction, a general building contractor; Philipp Huber, CTO/COO of the UK based XCalibre Communications, a hosting firm; Clyde Williams, Infrastructure Systems Manager for Southeast Alabama Medical Center; and Walt Cornelison, Director of Information Technology for Tropitone Furniture, a manufacturer of high-end outdoor furniture. Here's how our conversation went:
Find out about how much of a concern security is in an open source environment from a select group of CIOs at real-world companies.
The past few weeks have been frustrating and rewarding all at the same time. I had set a goal to configure an intrusion-detection system (IDS) using the de facto standard, Snort on Linux. In our environment, we have very little in the way of security tools and devices, and little or no budget to procure such items. This project was the first step in being able to detect potentially malicious network traffic as inexpensively as possible. security manage This article discuses a security managers experience with deploying a Linux intrusion-detection system. Have you implemented a IDS on your network? If so what was your experience?
Beginning with openSUSE 11.1, SUSE users will have an additional option regarding security frameworks. In addition to AppArmor, we will be adding SELinux capabilities in openSUSE 11.1, which will allow users to enable SELinux in openSUSE if they wish.
Have you hear that openSUSE 11.1 will have the options to enable SELinux? My question is how useful will enabling SElinux on SUSE will be without a useful security policy? I guess we will have to wait and see if this move will help the distributions security.
As you all probably known since version 3 Nessus turned to a proprietary model and started charging for the latest plugins locking most of us out. Now we finally have a new, properly organized forked development with the name of OpenVAS - at last a decent and free Vulnerability Scanner!
OpenVAS is a network security scanner which contains a graphical user front-end to help find problems in remote systems and applications. Have you tested it out?
Attacking PHP Weak PRNGs: mt_srand and "Random Numbers" (Aug 20)
PHP comes with two random number generators named rand() and mt_rand(). The first is just a wrapper around the libc rand() function and the second one is an implementation of the Mersenne Twister pseudo random number generator. Both of these algorithms are seeded by a single 32 bit dword when they are first used in a process or one of the seeding functions srand() or mt_srand() is called.
This is a great article by Stefan Esser on attacking php PRNG. He explains the attack in such a way that it's easy to understand.
EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.20 Now Available (Aug 19)
Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.20 (Version 3.0, Release 20). This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes and some feature enhancements to the EnGarde Secure Linux Installer and the SELinux policy.
In distribution since 2001, EnGarde Secure Community was one of the very first security platforms developed entirely from open source, and has been engineered from the ground-up to provide users and organizations with complete, secure Web functionality, DNS, database, e-mail security and even e-commerce.
Tresys have announced the launch of a new source repository, bugtracker and wiki for the SELinux userland code, which may be found here. The site utilizes trac for project management and git as the source code management system. Developers should use this new repository instead of the old sourceforge site.
Have you heard that Tresys has created a page for SELinux userland projects? There is some great information on it if you are interested in SELinux.
In 2004 Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macaulay presented All Your Layer Are Belong To Us at Pacsec in Tokyo. This presentation focused on the insecure behavior of wireless clients. Accompanying the presentation was a tool called KARMA (KARMA Attacks Radioed Machines Automatically). This tool acts as wireless access point and responds to all probe requests from wireless clients. Once a client has associated with the KARMA access point, every service they try to access leads to a malicious application. The services side of KARMA was written in Ruby, making it a perfect match for integration with version 3 of the Metasploit Framework.
Have you heard about the new security tool called Karmetasploit? It's said to work well for integrating with the Metaspliot Framework.
