Tuesday 10 June 2014

Partitioning and Mounting Disks For Security

This is part of a series of articles on Red Hat Server Hardening.

By creating different partitions, data can be separated and grouped. When an unexpected accident occurs, only data on that partition will be damaged, while the data on other partitions will survive.

During the initial installation, mount filesystems with user-writeable directories, such as the following, on separate partitions:
  • /usr
  • /home
  • /var
  • /var/tmp
  • /tmp

Apache and FTP server root directories should also be mounted on separate partitions.

To limit user access to filesystems, add the mount options from the following table to the filesystems configuration in /etc/fstab . The defaults option is equal to rw,suid,dev,exec,auto,nouser,async.

OptionDescription
noexecPrevents the execution of binaries (although scripts will not be prevented from running).
nosuidPrevents the setuid bit from having an effect.
nodevPrevents the use of device files.

Modify the /boot directory to be read only (ro). This reduces the risk of unauthorized modification of critical boot files.

For example, to modify the /etc/fstab entry to limit user access on /dev/sda5 (ftp server root directory):

Find the line that reads:
/dev/sda5  /ftpdata          ext3    defaults 1 2
And change it to:
/dev/sda5  /ftpdata          ext3    defaults,nosuid,nodev,noexec 1 2

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