Hardening: Theory and General Practice - Enemies of Security
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To achieve truer security, system administrators need to examine a method for analyzing systems to probe their weaknesses and detail their own assumptions about those systems’ security, rather than blindly placing trust in them. If security is to be discussed in a more serious way, there needs to be the following:
- Identification of what one is trying to protect
- Evaluation of the main sources of risk and where trust is placed
- Assumption of possible countermeasures to potential attacks
You can define a secure system as one in which all of the threats have been analyzed and one in which countermeasures are in place for all of the threats. There are a few stumbling blocks that hinder your ability to create secure systems. The first is complexity: Users will become impatient and work around security if it becomes too cumbersome for their work style and flow. Next is the need for backward compatibility in software. Often security is tightened in later revisions of software, but to remain operable with the previous version of a package, security restrictions might be loosened. Additionally, backups create a somewhat obscure but very real hole. The fact that backups are usually conducted with redundancy in mind might translate to more opportunity for data to be stolen. Security must be applied to backups as well as normal operations.
The problem, however, is how to know what all of the possible threats against a system are. That’s where this book comes in. You can’t always know all of your threats; it’s impossible to have that sort of knowledge. But you can batten down the hatches and take precautions to forestall and thwart any future attempted intrusions.
Some General Hardening Suggestions
In the rest of this chapter, I’ll discuss some points that you can consider to harden your network overall. I’ve broken them down into three encompassing categories: software, hardware, and network considerations. Again, the following aren’t meant to be specific suggestions; they’re meant more as broad launching points for the specific checkpoints presented later in this book, and for future improvements to the integrity of your network that you can make on your own.
 This chapter is from Hardening Windows, by Jonathan Hassell (Apress, 2004, ISBN: 1-59059-266-2). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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Next: Some General Hardening Suggestions: Software Considerations >>
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