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Reproducing a Microsoft corporate environment on Linux.

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.

IverCoder ,

BlueBuild and deploy your customized image to the devices

barbara ,

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.

TCB13 ,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

That’s the neat part, you don’t.

philpo ,

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.

cyborganism OP ,

Neat! I’ll check it out.

possiblylinux127 , (edited )

FreeIPA?

Edit: You can use Fleet comander fedoramagazine.org/join-fedora-linux-enterprise-d…

Landless2029 ,

There are plenty of RMM tools/companies that support Linux platforms.

possiblylinux127 ,

Name a few that run locally in a server and support domain services

Landless2029 ,

Connect wise and ninjaone come to mind.

Free and open source? If it’s enterprise pay for a suite.

possiblylinux127 ,

Those are true RMMs though

Not to mention they are going to get compromised at some point

Landless2029 ,

You can self host either platform so you have full control.

At that point anything you run is on you for security.

eugenia ,
@eugenia@lemmy.ml avatar

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…

richieadler ,

I’d say most of those are needed; they’re just not used.

cyborganism OP ,

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.

possiblylinux127 , (edited )

FreeIPA

Fleet comander seems to be great for this task. It runs FreeIPA among a few other things to allow for active directory like control.

fedoramagazine.org/join-fedora-linux-enterprise-d…

MonkderDritte ,

All in all, i guess something like Fedora Silverblue (immutable) with some remote management software?

independantiste ,
@independantiste@sh.itjust.works avatar

There is Zorin Grid (zorin.com/grid/) that I think is what you are looking for. It does not exist yet (and it has that notify button for a long long time, but there can still be hope it is not dead and it will come out one day.)

bizdelnick ,

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.

lemmyvore ,

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.

cyborganism OP ,

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.

MonkderDritte , (edited )

Allow only those tasks in policykit, make a link with pkexec <tool>?

bizdelnick ,

No way. You completely trust them or you do not trust them at all. In any OS. That’s how security works.

cybersandwich ,

Zero trust has entered the chat

Natanael ,

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

lolcatnip ,

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?

cyborganism OP ,

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.

LemmyHead ,

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

olsonexi ,
@olsonexi@lemmy.world avatar

policy control

It’s not exactly the same, but you could use puppet to enforce configuration

Software Center with software allow lists

You can setup a custom repository with only approved software and then set that as the only one that the system is configured to retrieve packages from. This can also be controlled via puppet.

controlled OS updates

Same as the previous point. Upgrades are installed from the repos.

zscaler

I don’t know what that is/does, and their website isn’t helping.

software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present

I’m pretty sure carbon black app control has a linux version.

antivirus

There are a number of different antivirus solutions for linux. A quick search will give you a bunch of lists. I’m not personally familiar with any of the options, but I don’t imagine it will be difficult to find one that will work for your use case.

nyek , (edited )

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 support.sophos.com/support/s/…/KB-000038296?langu… .

onlinepersona ,

@cyborganism 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 thingyCC BY-NC-SA 4.0

xavier666 ,

To add to your comment, there is already a native linux client for ZScalar which my workplace uses. We also use CrowdStrike for EDR, which is also Linux compatible.

Nomecks ,

$$$$$$$$$

cyborganism OP ,

Yeah that’s what I was thinking also. And what about SUSE? Could they have something similar?

caseyweederman ,

Or just like… Use Ansible?

nyek ,

sure but it just does a small part of OP’s requirements and you probably want some continuous monitoring to go along with that and a nice dashboard.

nayminlwin ,

I was looking for what you said a few years ago out of curiosity before and remember looking into something called Shibboleth. I didn’t looked into it in details but it seems to cover identity and policy management. Not sure about the rest of the features you need though.

AlexanderESmith ,
@AlexanderESmith@kbin.social avatar

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.
pixxelkick ,

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.

AlexanderESmith ,
@AlexanderESmith@kbin.social avatar

Didn't say it was the only way, just the best way. Most effective attacks are still against humans, not computers.

rho50 ,

You can restrict what gets installed by running your own repos and locking the machines to only use those (either give employees accounts with no sudo access, or have monitoring that alerts when repo configs are changed).

So once you are in that zone you do need some fast acting reactive tools that keep watch for viruses.

For anti-malware, I don’t think there are very many agents available to the public that work well on Linux, but they do exist inside big companies that use Linux for their employee environments. For forensics and incident response there is GRR, which has Linux support.

Canonical may have some offering in this space, but I’m not familiar with their products.

MrPoopyButthole ,
@MrPoopyButthole@lemmy.world avatar

The best methods to detect and prevent attacks on your endpoints are EDR software that are linked to your corporate router like FortiEDR, which supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and even some VDI like Citrix.

skullgiver , (edited )
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    rollingflower ,

    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.

    ryannathans ,

    Yes but insurance compliance necessitates AV

    rollingflower ,

    If you dont even have a way of running untrusted code on your production environment, how the heck is that worse than badness enumerating AV?

    Insurances…

    Jesus_666 ,

    Even if you assume that the software you run will never have exploitable security issues, AV can also keep you from spreading infected files e.g. through forwarded mails.

    rollingflower ,

    See above. There are tools for mail servers to strip and sandbox all executable attachements.

    MSOffice btw doesnt allow macros anymore afaik

    skullgiver ,
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    ricdeh ,
    @ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

    The correct way to call bash scripts is through bash, e.g.

    bash badware.sh

    rollingflower ,

    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

    AlexanderESmith ,
    @AlexanderESmith@kbin.social avatar

    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.

    xavier666 ,

    other than denying them root access, which might make it hard for them to use the system

    If the user is even slightly knowledgeable, they can’t all protection systems using sudo. That’s a big no-no if you want top-notch security. Source - I have broken my corporate’s Linux-specific protection mechanisms.

    octopus_ink ,

    If the user is even slightly knowledgeable, they can’t all protection systems using sudo. That’s a big no-no if you want top-notch security. Source - I have broken my corporate’s Linux-specific protection mechanisms.

    I’m not 100% sure I’m getting what you were trying to say in that first sentence, but you realize that not all users have sudo privileges, and if your company left you with sudo that was a mistake, correct?

    xavier666 ,

    I meant that if a company wants to maintain the highest levels of security, the user should never be given access to sudo. If a certain workflow requires sudo, the workflow needs to be changed, or it needs to be done in a sanitized environment, or the user needs to be highly trusted.

    DieserTypMatthias ,
    @DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml avatar

    Use NixOS if you want to use use strictly pre-installed software.

    skullgiver , (edited )
    @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    gaael ,

    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.

    crazyminner ,

    Nixos?

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