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.
In no particular order;
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.
Didn’t say it was the only way, just the best way. Most effective attacks are still against humans, not computers.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
Use NixOS if you want to use use strictly pre-installed software.