48 projects tagged "Operating System Kernels"
grsecurity is a complete security system for Linux 2.4 and 2.6 that implements a detection/prevention/containment strategy. It prevents most forms of address space modification, confines programs via its Role-Based Access Control system, hardens syscalls, provides full-featured auditing, and implements many of the OpenBSD randomness features. It was written for performance, ease-of-use, and security. The RBAC system has an intelligent learning mode that can generate least privilege policies for the entire system with no configuration. All of grsecurity supports a feature that logs the IP of the attacker that causes an alert or audit.
NSA Security-enhanced Linux is a set of patches to the Linux kernel and some utilities to incorporate a strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture into the major subsystems of the kernel. It provides a mechanism to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements, which allows threats of tampering and bypassing of application security mechanisms to be addressed and enables the confinement of damage that can be caused by malicious or flawed applications. It includes a set of sample security policy configuration files designed to meet common, general-purpose security goals.
The Linux Intrusion Detection System (LIDS) is a patch which enhances the kernel's security by implementing a reference monitor and Mandatory Access Control (MAC). When it is in effect, chosen file access, all system/network administration operations, any capability use, raw device, memory, and I/O access can be made impossible even for root. You can define which programs can access specific files. It uses and extends the system capabilities bounding set to control the whole system and adds some network and filesystem security features to the kernel to enhance the security. You can finely tune the security protections online, hide sensitive processes, receive security alerts through the network, and more.
Linux-VServer allows you to create virtual private servers and security contexts which operate like a normal Linux server, but allow many independent servers to be run simultaneously in one box at full speed. All services, such as ssh, mail, Web, and databases, can be started on such a VPS, without modification, just like on any real server. Each virtual server has its own user account database and root password and doesn't interfere with other virtual servers.
The Openwall Linux kernel patch is a collection of security "hardening" features for the Linux kernel. In addition to the new features, some versions of the patch contain various security fixes. The "hardening" features of the patch, while not a complete method of protection, provide an extra layer of security against the easier ways to exploit certain classes of vulnerabilities and/or reduce the impact of those vulnerabilities. The patch can also add a little bit more privacy to the system by restricting access to parts of /proc so that users may not see what others are doing.
Tin Hat is a Linux distribution derived from hardened Gentoo. It aims to provide a very secure, stable, and fast desktop environment that lives purely in RAM. Tin Hat boots from CD, or optionally USB pen drive, but it is not a LiveCD in that it does not mount any file system from the boot device. Rather, Tin Hat employs a massive squashfs image which expands into tmpfs upon booting. This makes for long boot times, but remarkable speeds during human-computer interaction.
ctunnel is a program for tunneling and proxying TCP or UDP connections via a cryptographic tunnel. ctunnel can be used to secure any existing TCP or UDP based protocol, such as HTTP, Telnet, FTP, RSH, MySQL, VNC, DNS, XDMCP, NFS, etc. You can also chain or bounce connections to any number of intermediary hosts.
Grml is a live system (live CD) based on Debian. It includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators and users of texttools. It provides automatic hardware detection and its default shell is the zsh. You can use it e.g. as a rescue system, for analyzing systems/networks, or as a working environment. It is not necessary to install anything to a hard disk; you don't even need a hard disk to run it. Due to on-the-fly decompression, it includes more than 2 GB of software and documentation on the CD.
Plash is a sandbox for running GNU/Linux programs with minimum privileges. It is suitable for running both command line and GUI programs. It can dynamically grant Gtk-based GUI applications access rights to individual files that you want to open or edit. This happens transparently through the Open/Save file chooser dialog box, by replacing GtkFileChooserDialog. Plash virtualizes the file namespace and provides per-process/per-sandbox namespaces. It can grant processes read-only or read-write access to specific files and directories, mapped at any point in the filesystem namespace. It does not require modifications to the Linux kernel.
Linux, in the tradition of UNIX-like operating systems, implements file system permissions using a rather coarse scheme. While this is sufficient for a surprisingly large set of applications, it is too inflexible for many other scenarios. For that reason, all the major commercial UNIX operating systems have extended this simple scheme in one way or the other. This is an effort to implement POSIX-like Access Control Lists for Linux. Access Control Lists are built on top of Extended Attributes, which can also be used to associate other pieces of information with files such as Filesystem Capabilities, or user data like mime type and search keywords.