security checking apps

[lawrenzo]

Hi all,

I have some scripts to check on some basic unix security however does anyone know of any apps that are built into HP / Linux / Sun / AIX that check certain security such as changes in files, permissions, trojans etc?

I am looking into using tripwire - does anyone have any other suggestions?

thanks

Chris.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Chris,

tripwire is the absolute standard in this area. Nothing else comes close.

It also runs on all the operating systems you mentioned.

It is part of HP-UX Internet Express for example.

For hardening, you should also use Bastille.

SEP

[Ivan Krastev]

You can also use snort and chkrootkit - all they are part of Internet Express - http://h20338.www2.hp.com/hpux11i/cache/324414-0-0-0-121.html

Also this applications are available for most of the Unix boxes.


regards,
ivan

[Pierre Pasturel]

FYI. For HPUX only, we support HPUX Host Host IDS that is tightly integrated with the kernel. I posted a comparison between a file integrity checker like tripwire with our HIDS at:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1040677

I like the quote from the CTO at Tripwire (Gene Kim) that you can find at http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/sf/ids/2000-q4/0071.html

"To roll up in one sentence, I view IDS as early warning detection, and integrity as damage assessment and recovery. I use both, because both are essential."

So, depends on your requirements. If batch-mode integrity checks are all you need, tripwire or similar integrity checkers is the way to go.

Pierre

[Don Mallory]

The Center for Internet Security (www.cisecurity.org) have a series of benchmarking and scoring tools. The majority of them are PDF documents with script snippets to relate to particular recommendations. A lot of it is in Bastille, but not all.

As well, they have scoring scripts, permission check scripts and a tool that checks against the SANS Top 20 list (www.sans.org).

For intrusion detection, Snort is great for network based attacks, Tripwire is both open source (free) and closed source (paid). The former is actually a university project by the founder of the TripWire corporation.

Red Hat Enterprise 5 now includes aide, which is just like Tripwire, but different, also open source.

There is also Tiger - The UNIX Security audit and Intrusion Detection Tool:
http://www.nongnu.org/tiger/

[Keith Buck]

It depends on what you want to do:

1. Bastille now includes a reporting mechanism for all the security-relevant things that it can harden (OS configuration items that are documented trade-offs between security and functionality). Bastille is also available for several Linux distributions.
2. HP-UX Software Assistant (https://www.hp.com/go/swa) has extensive reporting capabilities for known security vulnerabilities (bulletins) that could affect your system. Other OS's have similar tools (yum, apt, etc.) that at least update the system. Some (at least rudimentary) reporting is also generally available through those interfaces.
3. HP-UX IDS and Tripwire - See Pierre's comments
4. Center for Internet Security - similar purpose to Bastille, quite a bit of overlap from each direction but each includes things the other doesn't. Note that the HP-UX Benchmark was updated just a week or two ago.

Hope that helps.

-Keith