When Practical UNIX Security was first published in 1991, it became an instant classic. Crammed with information about host security, it saved many a UNIX system administrator and user from disaster.This second edition is a complete rewrite of the original book. It's packed with twice the pages and offers even more practical information for UNIX users and administrators. It covers features of many types of UNIX systems, including SunOS, Solaris, BSDI, AIX, HP-UX, Digital UNIX, Linux, and others. The first edition was practical, entertaining, and full of useful scripts, tips, and warnings. This edition is all those things -- and more.If you are a UNIX system administrator or user in this security-conscious age, you need this book. It's a practical guide that spells out, in readable and entertaining language, the threats, the system vulnerabilities, and the countermeasures you can adopt to protect your UNIX system, network, and Internet connection. It's complete -- covering both host and network security -- and doesn't require that you be a programmer or a UNIX guru to use it.Practical UNIX & Internet Security describes the issues, approaches, and methods for implementing security measures. It covers UNIX basics, the details of security, the ways that intruders can get into your system, and the ways you can detect them, clean up after them, and even prosecute them if they do get in. Filled with practical scripts, tricks, and warnings,Practical UNIX & Internet Security tells you everything you need to know to make your UNIX system as secure as it possible can be.Contents include:
- Part I: Computer Security Basics. Introduction and security policies.
- Part II: User Responsibilities. Users and their passwords, groups, the superuser, the UNIX filesystem, and cryptography.
- Part III: System Administrator Responsibilities. Backups, defending accounts, integrity checking, log files, programmed threats, physical security, and personnel security.
- Part IV: Network and Internet Security: telephone security, UUCP, TCP/IP networks, TCP/IP services, WWW, RPC, NIS, NIS+, Kerberos, and NFS.
- Part V: Advanced Topics: firewalls, wrappers, proxies, and secure programming.
- Part VI: Handling Security Incidents: discovering a breakin, U.S. law, and trust.
- VII: Appendixes. UNIX system security checklist, important files, UNIX processes, paper and electronic sources, security organizations, and table of IP services.
Practical Unix & Internet Security is on its second edition, and its maturity shows. To call this highly readable book comprehensive is an understatement. The breadth is vast, from fundamentals (definitions of computer security; the history of Unix) and commonsense but little-observed security basics (making backups; physical and personnel security; buggy software) to modern software (NFS, WWW, firewalls) and the handling of security incidents. The section on users and passwords alone is 21 pages long--and worth every page. Useful appendices include a Unix security checklist, a list of emergency response organisations, and many references to electronic and paper resources.
The Internet covers too much and moves too quickly for any book to cover every security aspect of every piece of software, but this book comes close. More importantly, it gives you an exceptional grounding in the fundamental issues of security and teaches the right questions to ask--something that will stay with you long after today's software is obsolete. --Jake Bond
