Re: securing a unix system - suggestions on checking for intrusions

Andrew Simpson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.org.user-groups.linux.new-zealand.general
Message-ID <20111006181754.16ed3cb9@orion>
On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:30:27 +1300
Nick Rout <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Robin Paulson
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > this was posted on /. earlier, in the wake of the kernel.org
> > intrusion last month.
> >
> > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1197924
> >
> > it shows some interesting capabilities rpm has which deb doesn't
> 
> I didn't see them, there was just a more laborious checking script for
> debs as opposed to the built in option for rpms

Actually the command 'rpm --verify --all', which is at the top of the
article, does much, much more than apt can do in verifying packages. [1]

The rpm keeps a database of md5sum, permissions, size, date, etc on each
installed file and each package. Hence this can very useful in checking
what's changed in a system - providing you can trust the database.[2]

I've used this when I used Redhat 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9.  It does tend to
spit out a lot of false positives - config files that are manually
changed, files in /dev, etc.

Since changing to apt based distributions, I've found no equivalent.
I guess you would have to install something like Tripwire.

Andrew

[1] http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ch-rpm-verify.html 
[2] http://www.sans.org/security-resources/idfaq/rpm.php

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