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 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.
Allow only those tasks in policykit, make a link with
pkexec <tool>?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?
Well for example, I work as a DevOps specialist. I need to install certain tools on my system like Docker, kubernetes, virtual machines, etc. Those kinds of tools often require admin privileges to use in development. I may need to modify some files related to those tools in /etc but I shouldn’t have access to all files. For example I would want to prevent users from modifying apt or yum repo sources.
I’m not a supporter of the approach of blocking sudo access from capable people (non tech yes), because they can still download and execute binaries as their user. Or go to rescue mode to make modifications. I had to do that myself because of a micro managing IT team. Allowed? No. Allows me to focus on my work and let me be efficient? Yes. Usually this approach also requires a backdoor tool on your device that they install, which is just ridiculous.
Just communicate setup requirements (drive encryption, firewall, AV,…) And have some tool to check the security requirements and rating and this way you can apply proper security policies in the company and respect the user’s privacy
No way. You completely trust them or you do not trust them at all. In any OS. That’s how security works.
Zero trust has entered the chat
Capabilities systems don’t even know what the concept of root is. They do however know all about access control tokens for every last system API
Takes a bit more than that to really lock down a Linux install. At the very least you’d have to also limit their ability to mount extra storage, mount their /home with noexec, and centrally manage their browser.