Linux Security Week: Network Projects And SELinux Updates

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?

news/network-security/a-diy-project-for-network-security

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?

news/network-security/open-vulnerability-assessment-system

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.

news/hackscracks/attacking-php-weak-prngs-mtsrand-and-qrandom-numbersq

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.

news/security-projects/karmetasploit