Re: LKM Trojan

[Travis Owens <openbook@linuxmds.com>]

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 18:12, Nathaniel Reindl wrote:
> You may want to be careful if you opt to set the noexec option on
> /home.  No, the care has nothing to do with your security; rather,
> your users may be a little tweaked to know that they can't install
> newer versions of programs in their homedirs that they use often.
> This also brings up the issue of user trust.

As with all machines--especially those on the Internet, security should
come right after stability. If this machine is a home user, this would
be a good point you make, but if it's a server, then it's the last thing
that's important. Servers have one job, and that's to serve. Stability
and security are chief goals. Users customizations are afterward.

One thing that I've read a while back, was to make every executable on
the machine sudo-ed. This way, there's a very limited amount of
executables on the system, and the really important ones are restricted
to password execution.

This would work really well in conjunction with your mounting almost all
systems read-only, then restricting access to the mount command. This
means that in order to remount the system writable, they'd have to give
the password.

I don't remember the exact setup this guy had, but it was pretty
elaborate. I remember thinking at the time, this is pretty slick.

Now, this would really only make sense on a full-time server, with
minimal interaction and updating or manual execution. Otherwise, it
would get to be a bit frustrating to manually interact with the system.

Just another take.
-- 
Travis Owens <openbook@linuxmds.com>


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