Most companies I’ve worked at where employees had a Microsoft work computers. They were under heavy control, even with admin privileges. I was wondering, for a corporate environment, how employees’Linux desktops could be kept under control in a similar way. What would be an open source or Linux based alternative to the following:
- policy control
- Software Center with software allow lists
- controlled OS updates
- zscaler
- software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
- antivirus
- VPN
I can think of a few things, like a company having it’s own software repos, or using an atomic distribution. There’s already open source VPN solutions if course. But for everything else I don’t really know what could be used or what setup we could have.
If you want to deploy Linux in an enterprise scenario properly, the only real option is using RHEL. Red Hat has a product called Satellite which allows for centralized managing of RHEL installs. This includes patch management, security policy monitoring and provisioning. You can also use something like Red Hat IdM to do user management like in AD. It is also basically your only choice if you have to comply with something like HIPAA.
@cyborganism@lemmy.ca this is RHEL’s business. Probably take a look at their documentation how they do it. Probably Fedora and OpenSuse are kind of downstream from that so they might know how to do so without getting paid service involved, but if you’re looking to do this for your company: Redhat is where to look.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Yeah that’s what I was thinking also. And what about SUSE? Could they have something similar?
Or just like… Use Ansible?
sure but it just does a small part of OP’s requirements and you probably want some continuous monitoring to go along with that and a nice dashboard.
To add to your comment, there is already a native linux client for ZScalar which my workplace uses. We also use CrowdStrike for EDR, which is also Linux compatible.
$$$$$$$$$
BlueBuild and deploy your customized image to the devices
I can highly recommend this. This is the modern way of creating corporate environments. It’s very easy to create, update and maintain, switch, go back.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
A lot of points you mention can be achieved with Univention (a debian based central management environment) and a few extra steps. Should be possible, imho.
Neat! I’ll check it out.
There is Zorin Grid (https://zorin.com/grid/) that I think is what you are looking for. It does not exist yet (and it has that notify button for a long long time, but there can still be hope it is not dead and it will come out one day.)
That list makes me wanna get a job on a small company of up to 10-20 people, where none of these things are usually needed…
I’d say most of those are needed; they’re just not used.
I hear you. But if we want Linux to seriously become the next desktop OS, I think it’s important to find something that gives large organisation some kind of way to manage their large IT inventory and users securely.
FreeIPAFleet comander seems to be great for this task. It runs FreeIPA among a few other things to allow for active directory like control.
https://fedoramagazine.org/join-fedora-linux-enterprise-domain/
All in all, i guess something like Fedora Silverblue (immutable) with some remote management software?
If you want to control users, don’t give them admin privileges.
Most of things you enumerated solve windows specific problems and therefore have no analogs in other OSes.
Takes a bit more than that to really lock down a Linux install. At the very least you’d have to also limit their ability to mount extra storage, mount their /home with noexec, and centrally manage their browser.
That’s the thing. They need some admin access. Especially if they’re working in IT and need to do certain tasks that require that privilege.
No way. You completely trust them or you do not trust them at all. In any OS. That’s how security works.
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The simplest solution is to set up the sudoers file to allow only specific commands your users need. I assume you need more than that, but what kinds of use cases does that solution fail to handle?
Well for example, I work as a DevOps specialist. I need to install certain tools on my system like Docker, kubernetes, virtual machines, etc. Those kinds of tools often require admin privileges to use in development. I may need to modify some files related to those tools in /etc but I shouldn’t have access to all files. For example I would want to prevent users from modifying apt or yum repo sources.
I’m not a supporter of the approach of blocking sudo access from capable people (non tech yes), because they can still download and execute binaries as their user. Or go to rescue mode to make modifications. I had to do that myself because of a micro managing IT team. Allowed? No. Allows me to focus on my work and let me be efficient? Yes. Usually this approach also requires a backdoor tool on your device that they install, which is just ridiculous.
Just communicate setup requirements (drive encryption, firewall, AV,…) And have some tool to check the security requirements and rating and this way you can apply proper security policies in the company and respect the user’s privacy
Allow only those tasks in policykit, make a link with
pkexec tool?
policy control
It’s not exactly the same, but you could use puppet to enforce configuration
Software Center with software allow lists
You can setup a custom repository with only approved software and then set that as the only one that the system is configured to retrieve packages from. This can also be controlled via puppet.
controlled OS updates
Same as the previous point. Upgrades are installed from the repos.
zscaler
I don’t know what that is/does, and their website isn’t helping.
software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
I’m pretty sure carbon black app control has a linux version.
antivirus
There are a number of different antivirus solutions for linux. A quick search will give you a bunch of lists. I’m not personally familiar with any of the options, but I don’t imagine it will be difficult to find one that will work for your use case.
There’s a lot of universities using Linux on their pc labs, I guess you can look up how they admin their systems to compare. When I was in college, I had a programming class (R language for actuarial sciences) and the computer had some restrictions, like we couldn’t save anything locally so we had to plug a pendrive to save our scripts and we couldn’t install any library not installed by default.
A universities desktop environments are not the same risk level of a corporate. All the uni I have seen have trash management. In corpos its a mix of trash and highly polished depending on who is in charge.
Unis tend to be a mess because professors and department heads can just say “I don’t want any sysadmin telling me what to do with my machines” and that’s that.
Linux noob here… But aren’t there user types? Like admin with install permissions and user type without ? Doesn’t that take care of most of your questions?
Not really. I want users with some admin privileges. As someone pointed out, a properly configured sudoers file can allow that with sudo.
Most of this would probably be handled by the regular unix permissions and things like sudo access for commands that are needed. You can specify exactly what commands people can run using sudo. You can also make groups so that you can have people that can run certain commands in those groups. As far as default permissions to run files, that would be handled by your path and execute permissions. Same with umask settings. I worked at a large company and to my delight and a lot of windows users dismay, they forced us to have linux laptops for our particular jobs. I loved it, but a lot of people just weren’t happy. I found that I could do everything much easier when I had native tools for working with other unix based machines right there on my desktop.
Fun fact (that I just took advantage of in a CTF), sudo can also limit command line arguments. If you only want a user to restart a service but not stop it, you can restrict sudo to only
systemctl restart mysvc.serviceYou can also use regex expressions. In our work env, we have specific id’s that are allowed to run certain commands. And only certain people have the ability to “sudo su - [authorized id]”. Then when you are using that id, you have commands you can run specific to the job. Also worth noting, those id’s are set to not allow login. You have to sudo to be able to get to the id.
One thing to take a look at for central account control, sudo rules and a few other things. Is freeipa/rhel idm.
What is ‘unallowed software’? A shell script the user wrote? Something they downloaded and compiled?
Limiting that seems fundamentally at odds with FOSS.
But not at odds with running a corporate environment.
Of course not, but you have to either trust your users to some extent or give them a system that’s locked down to the point of hindering them.
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Could be things to execute. They may run a shell script (source it if they don’t have exec permission), but they won’t have all the previleged commands (definitely no dd)
Granted most open source free software don’t have licenses that limit usage like many commercial software. You might want to keep track of the commercial software. Or look for versions that have important vulnerabilities.
Antivirus would probably be clamav.
As for policy, selinux would be my first Google.
Software allow lists I’m only going to mention system wide since stopping user space installs or chroots would be your software detection tool that I would be clueless on. System wide I’d look at sudo where you can control exactly what root level commands different users/groups can run.
If you don’t want the user to install software, you can mount any user writable partitions noexec. That will not stop them from running scripts though.
Nod32 offers a commercial antivirus for that scenario as well. The consumer variant has been discontinued.
There’s Zscaler for Linux. We’re using it in our corpo.
You have to run your software mirror no matter what. Even if it’s a proxy mirror where you don’t actually store most of the packages.
SELinux/AppArmor for more granular access policies.
SSSD connects local auth with AD.
You should look into what your vendor has on offer, e.g. Landscape if you’re on Ubuntu.
As others have said config-as-code would probably be part of the equation too.
Zscaler is corporate spyware. As far as I know, it can log all connections, even ones that don’t go through the Zscaler nodes. It can also act as MITM proxy.
I’m doubtful about whether it’s (or at least many configurations of it) are legal in EU.
I hate zscaler. At my company it’s set up so that it proxies all traffic through it and comes with its own CA certificates, which breaks a lot of things - I can’t install pip packages for python, I can’t clone/work with git repos if they’re on https only. We are used to temporarily disable it to do these things because corporate won’t change the policies.
Sounds like it’s used as a MITM proxy and logs all website URLs you visit. If you live in EU that’s probably illegal.
