Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:19:06 +0200 From: David Naylor <naylor.b.david@gmail.com> To: Roland Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD and User Security Message-ID: <200806121519.12820.naylor.b.david@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20080611214743.GA18371@slackbox.xs4all.nl> References: <200806112225.36221.naylor.b.david@gmail.com> <20080611214743.GA18371@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
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--nextPart1260918.VHSsbj4oUg Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline On Wednesday 11 June 2008 23:47:43 you wrote: > On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:25:32PM +0200, David Naylor wrote: > > Hi All, > > > > Today I read an article describing how my government had lost ZAR200 000 > > 000 from fraud. This is just under $25 000 000. The article credited > > this loss largely due to the use of spyware. > > > > My question is how secure is FreeBSD (including KDE, GNOME and XFCE) to > > attacks, including cracking and spyware. > > That is a very broad question without a simple answer. It depends among > other things on the purpose of the machine and the knowledge of the > administrator. > > E.g, if you are creating a workstation that doesn't run externally > accessible servers you could configure the firewall to block all > incoming new connection requests. That will go a long way toward > safeguarding the machine against network attacks. > > There is no way to safeguard a machine that an attacker has physical > access to; he could e.g. steal the harddisk and read your data at his > leisure (unless it is encrypted on-disk, e.g. with geli(8)). Also, no OS > can defend against social engineering attacks. > > I would not worry overly much about spyware. Most if not all of those > are windows binaries. Also, unix mail clients as a rule do not execute > scripts embedded in mail messages. I think this argument is rather mute, just because there are no programs=20 exploiting security vulnerabilities does not been there are not=20 vulnerabilities, and a determined cracker would create his own program. Th= at=20 said I hope there are, actually, no vulnerabilities. =20 [Security through obscurity is just an illusion] > > In addition, is there anyway to > > prevent a user from executing a program that is not owned by root (i.e. > > any program installed by the user), this would prevent spyware being > > installed (assuming root has been properly locked down) and subsequently > > run. > > You could mount /home and other partitions where users have write access > like /tmp with the noexec option. Note that that wouldn't block the > execution of scripts, just binaries. Excellent idea, that would work just fine :-). I think /var/tmp should be= =20 added to the list. =20 If a script is run using #!/bin/sh would that then be executable with noexe= c=20 (i.e. running "./example.sh" instead of "sh ./example.sh) Thank you to everyone who has replied, it was been informative. =20 Regards David --nextPart1260918.VHSsbj4oUg Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQBIUSJQUaaFgP9pFrIRAovKAJwN0vTkqQ8mrZQ80SRy+ZvXhj+80gCeK4hp QKiJdPEiSPGGSDws3prkB74= =hPZJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --nextPart1260918.VHSsbj4oUg--
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