This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include "Plaintext Recovery Attack Against SSH," "Hardening The Linux Kernel With Grsecurity," and "Analyzing Malicious SSH Login Attempts."

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LinuxSecurity.com Feature Extras:

A Secure Nagios Server - Nagios is a monitoring software designed to let you know about problems on your hosts and networks quickly. You can configure it to be used on any network. Setting up a Nagios server on any Linux distribution is a very quick process however to make it a secure setup it takes some work. This article will not show you how to install Nagios since there are tons of them out there but it will show you in detail ways to improve your Nagios security.

Never Installed a Firewall on Ubuntu? Try Firestarter - When I typed on Google "Do I really need a firewall?" 695,000 results came across. And I'm pretty sure they must be saying "Hell yeah!". In my opinion, no one would ever recommend anyone to sit naked on the internet keeping in mind the insecurity internet carries these days, unless you really know what you are doing.

Read on for more information on Firestarter.

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 3.0.21 Now Available (Oct 7)

Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.21 (Version 3.0, Release 21). 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.
Plaintext Recovery Attack Against SSH (Nov 21)

The OpenSSH team has been made aware of an attack against the SSH protocol version 2 by researchers at the University of London. Unfortunately, due to the report lacking any detailed technical description of the attack and CPNI's unwillingness to share necessary information, we are unable to properly assess its impact.

Have you heard about the latest reported attack on the SSH protocol version 2? Do you think the SSH team made the right decision in not doing an emergency release? If you are interested in ways to prevent this attack, please read on...

news/hackscracks/plaintext-recovery-attack-against-ssh
Upcoming Conference Talks on SELinux Applications: sVirt and Kiosk Mode (Nov 20)

Recently, I've been busy getting the initial cut of sVirt out, and am currently processing community feedback before issuing an update. The basic idea behind sVirt is to apply MAC label security (SELinux, Smack etc.) to Linux-based virtualization schemes such as KVM, allowing the existing OS-level security mechanisms to be re-used for process-based VMs. This is an application one of the core advantages of Linux-based virtualization, where generally, all of the Linux process management infrastructure within the kernel and wider OS may be applied to domains which run inside Linux processes.

Would you agree that we don't need to modify the kernel security mechanism for MAC label security? Read on for more information.
Hardening The Linux Kernel With Grsecurity (Debian) (Nov 20)

Security is based on three characteristics: prevention, protection and detection. Grsecurity is a patch for Linux kernel that allows you to increase each of these points. This howto was performed on a Debian Lenny system. Thus some tools are Debian specific. However, tasks can be performed with other distro specific tools or even with universal tools (make).

Have you ever thought about testing Grsecurity? It takes some work what this article will walk you through it.
Zeroshell Delivers Big Network Services in a Small Package (Nov 19)

Hand-rolling your own Linux-based network servers, routers and wireless access points is easier than ever largely because of the proliferation of tiny, specialized Linux distributions like Zeroshell. Zeroshell weighs in at just over 100 megabytes, making it perfect for embedded devices like PC Engines WRAP boards, Soekris boards, Mini-ITX, and other small form-factor computers

Check out this lightweight Linux distro which is suited to delivering network security services running on embedded devices.

news/network-security/zeroshell-delivers-big-network-services-in-a-small-package
Analyzing Malicious SSH Login Attempts (Nov 18)

Malicious SSH login attempts have been appearing in some administrators' logs for several years. This article revisits the use of honeypots to analyze malicious SSH login attempts and see what can be learned about this activity. The article then offers recommendations on how to secure one's system against these attacks.

Have you ever looked at your ssh logs and notice attackers trying to get in? This article analyses those logs and presents some recommendations to show you how to make your ssh server more secure.

news/network-security/analyzing-malicious-ssh-login-attempts