UNIX SECURITY.doc.docVIP

UNIX SECURITY UNIX has taken the industry by storm in recent years. UNIX’s popularity is a result of its ability to provide a true multiprocessing, multitasking operating environment for today’s applications. In addition, UNIX is a scaleable operating system working on a mainframe through a personal computer. This scalability has and will accrue further selections of UNIX for future applications in the Client/Server environment. Finally, UNIX runs extremely well on the RISC technology of today. Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) currently supports symmetrical processing and reduced instruction code. UNIX is one of the few operating systems that takes advantage of this technology. Given all of these reasons and that organizations are trying to downsize to take advantage of the power of smaller computers and the result is the growth in UNIX. UNIX for all it’s good points still is an operating system that needs security. For that reason this article addresses ten risks areas that require review. We need to review a couple of rules about UNIX. First UNIX is case sensitive. All commands are in lower case whereas files and directories could be upper or lower or a combination of both. Second, UNIX is a hierarchical file system. The top directory is the root directory and the slash / leans forward within UNIX. So the root directory is simply a forward ” /”. Under the root directory there are several system subdirectories. These include the following: /bin This directory has all the system commands within UNIX /usr This directory has all the user accounts specifically their home directories /tmp This directory is used to sort files and compile programs temporarily /dev This directory is used to define all the devices that will be attached to the UNIX machine /etc This directory is used to define many files that relate to security and control In order to audit or secure UNIX the reviewer will need to learn five UNIX commands.