A SysAdmin’s Essential Guide to Linux Workstation Security

✍ Scribed by Konstantin Ryabitsev

• Publisher: The Linux Foundation
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 34
• Series: Linux FoundationTraining
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A SysAdmin’s Essential Guide to Linux Workstation Security

How to work from anywhere and keep your data, identity, and sanity

By Konstantin Ryabitsev
Director of IT Infrastructure Security
at The Linux Foundation

This document is aimed at teams of systems administrators who use
Linux workstations to access and manage your project’s IT infrastructure.
If your systems administrators are remote workers, you may use this set
of guidelines to help ensure that their workstations pass core security
requirements in order to reduce the risk that they become attack vectors
against the rest of your IT infrastructure.

Even if your systems administrators are not remote workers, chances
are that they perform a lot of their work either from a portable laptop in
a work environment, or set up their home systems to access the work
infrastructure for after-hours/emergency support. In either case, you can
adapt this set of recommendations to suit your environment.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Choosing the right hardware  6
Pre-boot environment  7
Distro choice considerations  9
Distro installation guidelines  12
Post-installation hardening  16
Personal workstation backups  19
Best practices  21
Password managers  26
Securing SSH and PGP private keys  28
Hibernate or shut down, do not suspend 29
SELinux on the workstation 29
Further reading  31
License  31
Printable Checklist 32

✦ Subjects

Linux System System Administration Computer Security