Monthly Archives: September 2011

Quickly setup a Gentoo system

In order to verify if the installation instructions in the Gentoo Handbook are still valid, and to allow me to quickly seed new Gentoo installations in a virtual environment, I wrote a very ugly (really) script to automatically “stage” a … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo, Hardened | 7 Comments

Power management guide updated

The Gentoo Power Management Guide is now updated. It is a full rewrite, focusing currently on two main toolsets: Laptop Mode Tools and cpufreqd. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of features that the laptop mode tools package provided. … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo | 1 Comment

Mitigating risks, part 4 – Mandatory Access Control

I’ve talked about service isolation earlier and the risks that it helps to mitigate. However, many applications still run as highly privileged accounts, or can be abused to execute more functions than intended. Service isolation doesn’t help there, and system … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Hardened, Security, SELinux | 1 Comment

Catching up

As mentioned on the gentoo-doc mailinglist, all documentation bugs (that we know of) related to openrc have been fixed. It was already a week like so, but the last dependency on our “tracker” bug was an open one (asking if … Continue reading

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Mitigating risks, part 3 – hardening

While I’m writing this post, my neighbor is shouting. He’s shouting so hard, that I was almost writing with CAPS on to make sure you could read me. But don’t worry, he’s not fighting – it is how he expresses … Continue reading

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Mitigating risks, part 2 – service isolation

Internet: absolute communication, absolute isolation ~Paul Carvel The quote might be ripped out of its context completely, since it wasn’t made when talking about risks and the assurance you might need to get in order to reduce risks. But it … Continue reading

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Mitigating risks, part 1

We are running Foobar 2.0 on Tomcat 4. We know that Tomcat 4 isn’t supported, but hey – our (internal) customer is happy that the Foobar application works and would like to keep it that way. Upgrading to Tomcat 5 … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Security | 1 Comment

Now using refpolicy 2.20110726

A few days ago, I committed the SELinux policy modules that are based on the 2.20110726 set released upstream. For those that are using Gentoo Hardened with SELinux, you’ll find them if you use the ~arch set for the sec-policy … Continue reading

Posted in Hardened, SELinux | Leave a comment