Security Archives

How to manually copy SSH public keys to servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

By Leo Ufimtsev November 2, 2018November 1, 2018

We often use ssh-copy-id to copy ssh keys from our local Linux computers to RHEL servers in order to connect without typing in a password. This is not only for convenience; it enables you to script and automate tasks that involve remote machines. Also, using ssh keys correctly is considered a best practice. If you are conditioned to respond with your password every time you are prompted, you might not notice a prompt that isn’t legitimate (for example, spoofed).

What about when you can’t use ssh-copy-id or the target user ID doesn’t have a password (for example, an Ansible service user)? This article explains how to do it manually and avoid the common pitfall of forgetting to set the proper permissions.

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Securing .NET Core on OpenShift using HTTPS

By Tom Deseyn October 12, 2018October 11, 2018

In an effort to improve security, browsers have become stricter in warning users about sites that aren’t properly secured with SSL/TLS. ASP.NET Core 2.1 has improved support for HTTPS. You can read more about these enhancements in Improvements to using HTTPS. In this blog post, we’ll look at how you can add HTTPS to your ASP.NET Core applications deployed on Red Hat OpenShift.

Before we get down to business, let’s recap some OpenShift vocabulary and HTTPS fundamentals. If you are familiar, you can skip over these sections.

OpenShift, pods, services, routes, and S2I

OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based open-source container application platform. A Kubernetes pod is a set of containers that must be deployed on the same host. In most cases, a pod consists of a single container. When we run the same application in several pods, a service does the load balancing across those pods. A route makes a service accessible externally via a hostname.

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Integrating third-party identity providers with Red Hat 3scale API Management

By Luca Ferrari October 9, 2018October 8, 2018

This post describes how to configure OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication using an external Identity Provider (IdP). With the new release of Red Hat 3scale API Management, version 2.3, it is possible to use any OIDC-compliant IdP during the API authentication phase. This is a very important new feature because it makes it possible to integrate any IdP already present in your environment—without having to use an Identity Broker—thus reducing overall complexity.

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Configuring NGINX for OAuth/OpenID Connect SSO with Keycloak/Red Hat SSO

By Siddhartha De October 8, 2018

In this article I cover configuring NGINX for OAuth-based Single Sign-On (SSO) using Keycloak/Red Hat SSO. This allows the use of OpenID Connect (OIDC) for federated identity. This configuration is helpful when NGINX is acting as a reverse-proxy server for a backend application server, for example, Tomcat or JBoss, where the authentication is to be performed by the web server.

In this setup, Keycloak will act as an authorization server in OAuth-based SSO and NGINX will be the relaying party. We will be using lua-resty-openidc, which is a library for NGINX implementing the OpenID Connect relying party (RP) and/or the OAuth 2.0 resource server (RS) functionality.

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How to set up LDAP authentication for the Red Hat AMQ 7 message broker console

By Elvadas Nono September 21, 2018September 28, 2018

This post is a continuation of the series on Red Hat AMQ 7 security topics for developers and ops people started by Mary Cochran. We will see how to configure LDAP authentication on a Red Hat AMQ 7 broker instance. In order to do so, we will go perform the followings actions:

Set up a simple LDAP server with a set of users and groups using Apache Directory Studio.
Connect Red Hat AMQ 7 to LDAP using authentication providers.
Enable custom LDAP authorization policies in Red Hat AMQ 7.

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Securing apps and services with Keycloak (Watch DevNation Live video)

By Burr Sutter August 28, 2018August 27, 2018

The video from the last DevNation Live: Securing apps and services with Keycloak is now available to watch online. In this session, you will learn how to secure web/HTML5 applications, single-page and mobile applications, and services with Keycloak. Keycloak can be used to secure traditional monolithic applications as well as microservices and service mesh-based applications that need secure end-to-end authentication for all front- and back-end services. The examples in the video cover PHP, Node.js, and HTML/JavaScript.

Securing applications and services is no longer just about assigning a username and password. You need to manage identities. You need to integrate with legacy and external authentication systems to provide features that are in demand like social logins and single sign-on (SSO). Your list of other requirements may be long. But you don’t want to develop all of this yourself, nor should you.

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Firewalld: The Future is nftables

By Eric Garver August 10, 2018August 9, 2018

Firewalld, the default firewall management tool in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, has gained long sought support for nftables. This was announced in detail on firewalld’s project blog. The feature landed in the firewalld 0.6.0 release as the new default firewall backend.

The benefits of nftables have been outlined on the Red Hat Developer Blog:

There are many longstanding issues with firewalld that we can address with nftables that were not possible with the old iptables backend. The nftables backend allows the following improvements:

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Detecting String Truncation with GCC 8

By Martin Sebor May 24, 2018July 2, 2018

Continuing in the effort to detect common programming errors, the just-released GCC 8 contains a number of new warnings as well as enhancements to existing checkers to help find non-obvious bugs in C and C++ code. This article focuses on those that deal with inadvertent string truncation and discusses some of the approaches for avoiding the underlying problems. If you haven’t read it, you might also want to read David Malcolm’s article Usability improvements in GCC 8.

Why Is String Truncation a Problem?

It is well-known why buffer overflow is dangerous: writing past the end of an object can overwrite data in adjacent storage, resulting in data corruption. In the most benign cases, the corruption can simply lead to incorrect behavior of the program. If the adjacent data is an address in the executable text segment, the corruption may be exploitable to gain control of the affected process, which can lead to a security vulnerability. (See CWE-119 for more on buffer overflow.)

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Elytron: A New Security Framework in WildFly/JBoss EAP

By Siddhartha De April 20, 2018April 19, 2018

Elytron is a new security framework that ships with WildFly version 10 and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7.1. This project is a complete replacement of PicketBox and JAAS. Elytron is a single security framework that will be usable for securing management access to the server and for securing applications deployed in WildFly. You can still use the legacy security framework, which is PicketBox, but it is a deprecated module; hence, there is no guarantee that PicketBox will be included in future releases of WildFly. In this article, we will explore the components of Elytron and how to configure them in Wildfly.

The Elytron project covers the following:

SSL/TLS
Secure credential storage
Authentication
Authorization

In this article, we are going to explore using SSL/TLS in WildFly with Elytron.

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Integrating Intercede RapID with Red Hat Mobile and OpenShift

By Evan Shortiss March 28, 2018April 2, 2018

At Red Hat Mobile we understand the need for a flexible product that enables our customers to integrate with the tools they need to build their current and future applications. Our position as a leading contributor to the Kubernetes project ensures that the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers this tremendous flexibility to customers and end users.

Red Hat Mobile also supports highly flexible integrations to a range of 3rd party services and products. In this article, we’ll demonstrate how Red Hat Mobile v4 and OpenShift v3 enable customers to rapidly deploy and secure their mobile applications by integrating with a third party product provided by Intercede. We’ll be using Intercede’s RapID product to enable two-way TLS (often referred to as Client Certificate Authentication or CCA) for our mobile application.

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Blog Articles

OpenShift, pods, services, routes, and S2I

Why Is String Truncation a Problem?