Designing and Using DMZ Networks to Protect Internet Servers

Some dæmons, such as named, have explicit support for being run in a “chroot jail” (i.e., such that to the chrooted process, “/” is actually some other directory that can't be navigated out of). This is a valuable security feature; if a chrooted process is hijacked or exploited somehow, the attacker will not be able to access files outside of the chroot jail.

On Linux, even processes that don't have built-in chroot support can be run chrooted: simply type chroot chroot-jail path command string. For example, to run the imaginary command bubba -v plop chrooted to /var/bubba, you would type:

chroot /var/bubba /usr/local/bin/bubba -v plop

Note, however, that any system files a chrooted process needs in order to run must be copied to appropriate subdirectories of the chroot jail. If our imaginary process bubba needs to parse /etc/passwd, we need to put a copy of the passwd file in /var/bubba/etc. The copy need not, however, contain any more information than the chrooted process needs; to extend our example still further, if bubba is a server that only anonymous users may access, /var/bubba/etc/passwd probably only needs one line (e.g., nobody::50:50:Anonymous user::/bin/noshell).

While some dæmons will only work if run by root (the default UID of processes invoked at startup time), nowadays many programs can be set to run as unprivileged users. For example, Postfix, Wietse Venema's sendmail replacement, usually runs with a special, unprivileged account named postfix.

This has a similar effect as chroot (and in fact the two often go together). Should the process become hijacked or otherwise compromised, the attacker will gain a level of access privileges lower than root's (hopefully much lower). Be careful, however, to make sure that such an unprivileged account still has enough privilege to do its job.

Some Linux distributions have, by default, lengthy /etc/passwd files that contain accounts even for use by software packages that haven't been installed. My laptop computer, for example, which runs SuSE Linux, has 22 unnecessary entries in /etc/passwd. Commenting out or deleting such entries, especially the ones that include executable shells, is important.

This is another thing we all know we should do but often fail to follow through on. You can't check logs that don't exist, and you can't learn anything from logs you don't read. Make sure your important services are logging at an appropriate level, know where those logs are stored and whether/how they're rotated when they get large, and get in the habit of checking the current logs for anomalies.

grep is your friend here: using cat alone tends to overwhelm people. You can automate some of this log-parsing with shell scripts; scripts are also handy for running diff against your system's configuration files to monitor changes (i.e., by comparing current versions to cached copies).

If you have a number of DMZ hosts, you may wish to consider using syslogd's ability to consolidate logs from several hosts on one system. You may not realize it, but the syslog dæmon can be configured to listen not only for log data from other processes on the local system, but on data from remote hosts as well. For example, if you have two DMZ hosts (bobo and rollo) but wish to be able to view both machines' logs in a single place, you could change bobo's /etc/syslogd.conf to contain only this line:

*.*        @rollo

This will cause syslogd on bobo to send all log entries not to its own /var/log/messages file but to rollo's.

While handy, be aware that this technique has its own security ramifications: if rollo is compromised, bobo's logs can also be tampered with. Furthermore, rollo's attacker may learn valuable information about bobo that they can subsequently use to attack bobo. This may or may not be of concern to you, but you should definitely think about whether the benefit justifies the exposure (especially given that the benefit may be that you can more effectively prevent your DMZ hosts from being compromised in the first place).

We'll close with the guideline that makes DMZs worthwhile in the first place.