Most companies I’ve worked at where employees had a Microsoft work computers. They were under heavy control, even with admin privileges. I was wondering, for a corporate environment, how employees’Linux desktops could be kept under control in a similar way. What would be an open source or Linux based alternative to the following:
- policy control
- Software Center with software allow lists
- controlled OS updates
- zscaler
- software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
- antivirus
- VPN
I can think of a few things, like a company having it’s own software repos, or using an atomic distribution. There’s already open source VPN solutions if course. But for everything else I don’t really know what could be used or what setup we could have.
If you want to deploy Linux in an enterprise scenario properly, the only real option is using RHEL. Red Hat has a product called Satellite which allows for centralized managing of RHEL installs. This includes patch management, security policy monitoring and provisioning. You can also use something like Red Hat IdM to do user management like in AD. It is also basically your only choice if you have to comply with something like HIPAA. For AV you can use something like Sophos if you absolutely need it https://support.sophos.com/support/s/article/KB-000038296?language=en_US .
@cyborganism@lemmy.ca this is RHEL’s business. Probably take a look at their documentation how they do it. Probably Fedora and OpenSuse are kind of downstream from that so they might know how to do so without getting paid service involved, but if you’re looking to do this for your company: Redhat is where to look.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Yeah that’s what I was thinking also. And what about SUSE? Could they have something similar?
That list makes me wanna get a job on a small company of up to 10-20 people, where none of these things are usually needed…
I hear you. But if we want Linux to seriously become the next desktop OS, I think it’s important to find something that gives large organisation some kind of way to manage their large IT inventory and users securely.
FreeIPAFleet comander seems to be great for this task. It runs FreeIPA among a few other things to allow for active directory like control.
https://fedoramagazine.org/join-fedora-linux-enterprise-domain/
I’d say most of those are needed; they’re just not used.
BlueBuild and deploy your customized image to the devices
I can highly recommend this. This is the modern way of creating corporate environments. It’s very easy to create, update and maintain, switch, go back.
FreeIPA?
Edit: You can use Fleet comander https://fedoramagazine.org/join-fedora-linux-enterprise-domain/
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For the execution, can’t you configure the fstab with noexec on partitions where the user has write permissions and give the user read-only permissions on the root partition ?
I think this would be fine for most jobs, the exception being software development where you usually need to execute stuff to test your programs.
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A lot of points you mention can be achieved with Univention (a debian based central management environment) and a few extra steps. Should be possible, imho.
Neat! I’ll check it out.
If you want to control users, don’t give them admin privileges.
Most of things you enumerated solve windows specific problems and therefore have no analogs in other OSes.
That’s the thing. They need some admin access. Especially if they’re working in IT and need to do certain tasks that require that privilege.
The simplest solution is to set up the sudoers file to allow only specific commands your users need. I assume you need more than that, but what kinds of use cases does that solution fail to handle?
In no particular order;
- Detecting “installed” software is iffy. Linux can have all kinds of things running on it that aren’t “installed” as-such (same as Windows with portable EXEs, Linux has AppImage/etc). Excepting things like that, you can detect installed apps through the package managers (apt/pkg/yum/snap/etc).
- OS updates in Debian-likes and Redhat-likes are controllable out of the box, but I’m not familiar with a way to prevent a user from doing them (other than denying them root access, which might make it hard for them to use the system, depending on what they need to do).
- I’ve had a lot of good results with OpenVPN.
- lol antivirus. Not saying Linux doesn’t get viruses, or that there arent antiviruses for Linux, but the best way to avoid getting them is still to just avoiding stupid shit. Best thing I can offer is that if you have some kind of centralized storage, check that for compromised files frequently, and keep excellent backups. And make sure your firewalls and ACLs don’t suck.
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To get rid of Viruses, simply clean out all executable attachments in mails, mailcow and other solutions support that.
You can also mount /home nonexecutable, which means everything you can run needs to be on the system. Without that, “control over what is installed” is worthless. You could literally download any package, export the binary and run it from anywhere.
To run untrusted software, you can use a server that uses something like KASM. It is image-based, accessed through the browser, suppports uploading files and viewing lots of stuff. You can also run antivirus there, but as shown in this video antivirus is often simply tricked by encoding and re-encoding the scripts into something like Base64.
Antivirus really is flawed. You need to control the origins of code, and run all untrusted code in immutable VMs.
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Excel sheets can be used without macros, i.e. executable code. Macros can be disabled in Libreoffice afaik, and this is likely possible via some sort of policy.
These are great things to try out and I want to experiment with it when I have time. For example not sure if policies work with flatpak, as users could be able to change them.
Antivirus is a joke, for sure you could run it, but it just doesnt work. It would be just there for the compliance, while you simply dont run any code, not even trusted code, that doesnt come from trusted repos like Fedora, Ubuntu or flathub-verified
You know, it only now occurs to me that - in 20 years of setting up fairly complicated spreadsheets (for everything from finance to asset management) - I’ve never used a macro.
I honestly don’t know why you would, since per-cell functions update automatically. I certainly can’t imagine why it would need to make system calls. Whole thing seems like a massive security issue with no benefit.
but the best way to avoid getting them is still to just avoiding stupid shit.
This is fine and dandy on a personal pc, but in a work environment you are now being actively targeted by malicious actors if your company is a good target.
Constantly.
So once you are in that zone you do need some fast acting reactive tools that keep watch for viruses.
What is ‘unallowed software’? A shell script the user wrote? Something they downloaded and compiled?
Limiting that seems fundamentally at odds with FOSS.
But not at odds with running a corporate environment.
There are plenty of RMM tools/companies that support Linux platforms.
Name a few that run locally in a server and support domain services
Connect wise and ninjaone come to mind.
Free and open source? If it’s enterprise pay for a suite.
Those are true RMMs though
Not to mention they are going to get compromised at some point
You can self host either platform so you have full control.
At that point anything you run is on you for security.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
