In my previous post, a very valid question was raised by Alexander E. Patrakov: why still use chroot if you have SELinux?

Both chroot (especially with the additional restrictions that grSecurity enables on chroots that make it more difficult to break out of a chroot) and SELinux try to isolate ...

The last isolation-related aspect on risk mitigation is called application firewalls. Like more "regular" firewalls, its purpose is to be put in front of a service, controlling which data/connections get through and which don't. But unlike these regular firewalls, application firewalls work on higher-level protocols (like HTTP, FTP ...

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 hardening can only go that far. The additional ...

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 his (positive) feelings about his religion.

Security ...

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 does give a nice introduction to the second part ...

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 or higher is not possible - Foobar 2.0 only ...

I have blogged about checksec.sh earlier before. Jono, one of the #gentoo-hardened IRC-members, kindly pointed me to its --kernel option. So I feel obliged to give its options a stab as well. So, here goes the next batch of OPE-style (One Paragraph Explanations).

~# checksec.sh --kernel
* Kernel protection information ...

One very important functionality offered by Gentoo Hardened is a specific toolchain (compiler, libraries and more) that contains patches to make the built binaries a bit more protected from certain vulnerabilities. Explaining all those in detail is too much for a simple blog post like this, but some time ago ...

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of cvechecker 3.0. It contains two major feature enhancements: watchlists and MySQL support.

watchlists allow cvechecker to track and report on CVEs for software that cvechecker didn't detect on the system (or perhaps even isn't installed on the system ...

The in-svn version of cvechecker has seen quite a few changes in the last few days. I'm adding support for MySQL to it. This support will be added in three steps:

1. support the same features as cvechecker currently does using sqlite
2. streamline the database code so that duplicate code ...