What does 'Securing Unix' mean?

Question

So I know WHAT *nix is and all but what does "Secure unix" mean? Here is the paragraph I read it in:

"Practical Unix and Internet Security (Sec. Edition): This is mostly a book about how to secure Unix (if you don’t know what Unix is, either shoot yourself now, or read O’Reilly’s Learning the Unix OS), but half of learning to hack is learning a system from the inside out. How can you expect to hack a site (w/o using a kiddie script, which i must restate, is NOT hacking) if you don’t know how to use the system?!"

So what does it mean 'secure unix'? Thanks :P

Answer 1

It means protecting the operating system from malware, hackers and script kiddies. By default, some Unix releases come with everything wide open (it was originally developed in a kinder, gentler era of computing). Securing Unix closes all the vulnerable holes that the badguys can use to hack the system.

Answer 2

It means going through the system and making it hard for anyone to do anything.



For example, if you have a system disk and a user disk, and users aren't allowed to install software, you mount the user disk noexec (no execute). If users aren't allowed to write their own software, you remove all the compilers. If they aren't allowed to use Bluetooth or WiFi, you remove the wireless drivers. If they are only allowed to login with SSH, you remove the ftp server. If they must use PKI keys or certificates , you disable passwords.



Doing too much of that makes the system non-standard and impossible to easily update or maintain.

It used to be more popular, but modern systems have much better defaults (services being off unless turned on) and more privilege dropping (services running non-privileged in their own user accounts, and/or chrooted, instead of all running as root like 20 years ago when you could run a scanner across the Internet and find thousands of vulnerable DNS servers that gave you immediate root access.



It is a total fallacy that Unix is secure and hard to hack. The single administrator account model is outdated and a security weakpoint. Windows 95 was totally insecure due to having no privilege separation, but NT did and Vista enforced it, so once all the legacy Windows apps and XP admin-only systems have died things will be on a more equal footing. Except that Windows is a bigger target for malware writers as it has a much larger installed base, less educated users, and a more consistent API - if you write a virus for Vista, it will probably run on Windows 7, but if you write one for Ubuntu 10 it probably won't work on Fedora 14 or FreeBSD or OpenSolaris.

Answer 3

Secure - to make safe.

UNIX - Operating system.



"to secure Unix" is to make it safe. That book probably has best practices and security procedures for configuring UNIX systems.

Answer 4

Unix and Linux operating systems are very difficult to hack. One reason is that they have an administrative - or super-user account that is not used for everyday use. As a result system files can't be easily changed by a hacker or virus.