MSc Practical UNIX Security Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

MSc Practical UNIX Security - Essay Example Furthermore, in the UNIX system's early periods, security feature was almost absent. Then, the UNIX system became the first operating system to undergo attacks raised over the promising Internet. With the passage of time, the security arrangement moved from centralized to distributed verification and permission systems (UNIX Systems Cooperative Promotion Group, 1997) and (The Open Group, 2010). This paper discusses various security aspects of UNIX operating system along with some types of attack that can be applied to UNIX operating system. The basic aim of this paper is to describe in a systematic manner the significance of systems configuration and management and how to undertake systems configuration and management for a UNIX system. Security Considerations With the advancements in the technology the chances of security attacks and their intensity is also increasing. In the past, a lot of security and privacy attacks have greatly influenced a large number of organizations and busi nesses. Some well known examples of these attacks include, security develops Nimda, Code Red, RPC buffer overflows, SQL Slammer Worm, SSH vulnerabilities. Thus, to deal with such new types of security attacks a good security management patch as well as effective security strategy is very important, which can help secure organization’s systems and networks. Seeing that the businesses having a high-quality patch security strategy (which implemented all the recognized patches to the target systems) were not influenced or were least influenced as compared to those businesses which neglected patch security strategies and faced harsh issues like business downtime of numerous days and failure of business effort (code as well as data). In this scenario, all the practical systems have their own techniques for implementing security patches. Additionally, HP-UX, Solaris and AIX program and patch installation techniques allow the elimination of an application or a patch by restoring some overwritten operating system files as the â€Å"save† alternative is employed (that is the default option). In addition, the capability to get rid of a (reminded) security patch makes simpler patch administration on these systems liberating the manager from planning routine techniques for patch management and permitting the administrator to focus on improving system security. For this purpose, HP, Sun and IBM offered standard security patch packages for download a number of times every year, in addition to individual patch downloads as well as patch announcement services which can be received via electronic mail (without paying registration fee). Moreover, specific patch downloads are always available at retailer’s websites and a few mirrors for Red Hat Linux. However, the accessibility of alternatives is significant, for the reason that standard patch packages make simpler the normal application of patches as well as get rid of the need for numerous reboots and/or sy stem configuration changes, as individual patch downloads permit the system application of a security patch at the instant as it is accessible (Tsitsivas et al., 2003), (Zheng & Zhang, 2009), (Curphey & Araujo, 2006) and (Ray, 2004). UNIX Security Overview Normally, all UNIX-based or other systems encompass particular log on procedures. However, these procedures depend on