Secure By Default - PLEASE!

How bout it SuSE? I have bought every version of SuSE since 5.0, I have Installed >30 SuSE servers for various clients and given away 200 copies of the SuSE 6.4 demo CD at a Govt Expo (in Australia) (Thanks to Michaela Geuthner [mailto:mg@suse.de] for the promo material he shiped me at short notice from Germany) I love SuSE, and thinks it's the best Distro available, yet, a disabled by default policy would IMHO be the best thing SuSE could ever do. As far as I'm concerned the only thing that should be enabled by default is sshd and _thats's_ even debatable. Face it, it's not going to make it any harder for your average desktop flunkie who want's to setup a kde box and browse the web. If they want to run a personal web server or ftp server then that _should_ know how to enable it from inetd.conf etc, or they should NOT be running the thing. I think the harden SuSE script, and SuSE firewall is brilliant, but half of the things harden_suse does should be _default_ not options available in an optional package in the sec series.... PLEASE PLEASE make a few simple changes to the defaults to help make SuSE the most secure Mainstream linux distro out there in. Peter Nixon Senior Security Consultant IT Audit & Consulting (ITAC) Pty Ltd http://www.itaudit.com.au mailto:petern@itaudit.com.au --snip--

To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM

Aleph One wrote:

...

CERT Advisory CA-2000-17 Input Validation Problem in rpc.statd

Original release date: August 18, 2000 Source: CERT/CC

A complete revision history is at the end of this file. .. RedHat

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/RHSA-2000-043-03.html

It should be noted that Red Hat states: "Although there is no known exploit for the flaw in rpc.statd, Red Hat urges all users running rpc.statd to upgrade to the new nfs-utils package."

This is wrong.

Because of a message posted by "ron1n - " on the 5th of August to Bugtraq.

I quote: "Included below is an exploit for the recently exposed linux rpc.statd format string vulnerability[0]. I have tailored it towards current Redhat Linux 6.x installations. It can easily be incorporated into attacks against the other vulnerable Linux distributions."

I hope Red Hat updates this information. Although I really hope they'll just disable rpc.* services, most things in inetd, and other daemons *BY DEFAULT*. If a user can't figure out how to turn on a service, they probably shouldn't be running the service in the first place. This alone would stop most of the "remote root in default" problems that Red Hat (and other Linuxes) seem to face. OpenBSD gets this correct, how hard can it be for the various Linux distrubtions to insert some #s in inetd.conf, or have things chmod -x by default?

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