Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks: Server Security from TLS to Tor

1. Overall Security Concepts

Before we get into specific hardening techniques, it’s important to build a foundation with the security principles we will apply to all of the hardening techniques in the rest of the book. No security book can cover every possible type of threat or how to harden every type of system, but if you understand some of the basic concepts behind security, you can apply them to whatever application you’d like to secure.

This chapter covers two main topics. First, I introduce general security principles you can apply to any specific security problem. Then, I introduce one of the biggest general security problems you might face—passwords’and explain the threats to passwords in detail as well as how to apply those security ...