Question
Hardening CentOS 7 (firewalld, selinux)
- Posted September 10, 2014
I recently launched a CentOS 7 droplet and noticed that both firewalld and selinux were disabled by default. Does anyone have a good introductory guide on hardening CentOS 7?
I’m used to setting up an Ubuntu Server install such as:
- ssh hardening (ports, retries, key_auth. fail2ban)
- firewall hardening (ufw)
- application specific hardening
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See here: RHEL7 Security Guide
And here: RHEL7 SELinux
In particular:
systemctl start firewalld
systemctl enable firewalld
And
vi /etc/selinux/config
set enforcing or permissive.
shutdown -r now (or reboot)
After reboot, confirm:
sestatus
And to harden ssh: First confirm you’re able to login via ssh keys. Then generate a list of all authentication methods, like this:
man sshd_config | grep 'Authentication$'
Then
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Search for all instances of “Authentication” and comment them out. Paste the afore-generated list, as follows:
PubkeyAuthentication yes
RSAAuthentication no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
GSSAPIAuthentication no
HostbasedAuthentication no
KerberosAuthentication no
PasswordAuthentication no
RhostsRSAAuthentication no
And restart sshd
systemctl restart sshd
See here: RHEL7 Security Guide
And here: RHEL7 SELinux
In particular:
systemctl start firewalld
systemctl enable firewalld
And
vi /etc/selinux/config
set enforcing or permissive.
shutdown -r now (or reboot)
After reboot, confirm:
sestatus
And to harden ssh: First confirm you’re able to login via ssh keys. Then generate a list of all authentication methods, like this:
man sshd_config | grep 'Authentication$'
Then
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Search for all instances of “Authentication” and comment them out. Paste the afore-generated list, as follows:
PubkeyAuthentication yes
RSAAuthentication no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
GSSAPIAuthentication no
HostbasedAuthentication no
KerberosAuthentication no
PasswordAuthentication no
RhostsRSAAuthentication no
And restart sshd
systemctl restart sshd
nothing is running except SSH???
there are literally hundreds of processes running…
are you insane or are just trying to troll?
anyway, if you are so certain your set up is so secure please post the ip numbers of your servers here.
@giluxxx
Who cares about SELINUX and FIREWALL if its a minimal installation? Nothing is running except SSH… so even if you have SELINUX and FIREWALL, SSH is still exposed.
Thumbs Up for DigitalOcean providing a real minimal installation.
@storrgie
if you install your OS you want it to have at least BASIC security since these droplets will be connected to the internet by default. Since any image will most probably have outdated packages it therefor there is at risk right after first boot because of possible remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.
so, enabling selinux and a firewall is not considered hardening its considered basic security.
after that you can start HARDENING it.
i think it’s insane these images come without selinux and firewall enabled by default.
just give me one reason why it shouldn’t be!
@giluxxx I don’t think thats what the intent is, they are providing a bare system that should be hardened by the individual. I do think they should have an officially tended guide (or offer to pay a community member to write one).
what is wrong with the engineers at digital ocean that they disable firewalld and selinux on purpose?
makes you wonder about their own systems… and if doing business with them is such a good idea after all…
@wiesson You might want to check out the tutorial series New CentOS 7 Server Checklist
I’m also interested in this question!