Databases, Systems & Networks

As someone says, security is a not a product, but a process. While SSH protocol itself is cryptographically secure by design, someone can wreak havoc on your SSH service if it is not administered properly, be it weak passwords, compromised keys or outdated SSH client.

As far as SSH authentication is concerned, public key authentication is in general considered more secure than password authentication. However, key authentication is actually not desirable or even less secure if you are logging in from a public or shared computer, where things like stealth keylogger or memory scraper can always a possibility. If you cannot trust the local computer, it is better to use something else. This is when “one-time passwords” come in handy. As the name implies, each one-time password is for single-use only. Such disposable passwords can be safely used in untrusted environments as they cannot be re-used even when they are stolen.

One way to generate disposable passwords is via Google Authenticator. In this tutorial, I am going to demonstrate another way to create one-time passwords for SSH login: OTPW, a one-time password login package. Unlike Google Authenticator, you do not rely on any third party for one-time password generation and verification.

What is OTPW?

OTPW consists of one-time password generator and PAM-integrated verification routines. In OTPW, one-time passwords are generated apriori with the generator, and carried by a user securely (e.g., printed in a paper sheet). Cryptographic hash of the generated passwords are then stored in the SSH server host. When a user logs in with a one-time password, OTPW’s PAM module verifies the password, and invalidates it to prevent re-use.

Step One: Install and Configure OTPW on Linux

Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint:

Install OTPW packages with apt–get.

$ sudo apt-get install libpam-otpw otpw-bin

Open a PAM configuration file for SSH (/etc/pam.d/sshd) with a text editor, and comment out the following line (to disable password authentication).

#@include common-auth

and add the following two lines (to enable one-time password authentication):

auth       required     pam_otpw.so
session    optional     pam_otpw.so

Fedora or CentOS/RHEL:

OTPW is not available as a prebuilt package on Red Hat based systems. So let’s install OTPW by building it from the source.

First, install prerequites:

$ sudo yum git gcc pam-devel
$ git clone https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/git/otpw
$ cd otpw

Open Makefile with a text editor, and edit a line that starts with “PAMLIB=” as follows.

On 64-bit system:

PAMLIB=/usr/lib64/security

On 32-bit system:

PAMLIB=/usr/lib/security

Compile and install it. Note that installation will automatically restart an SSH server. So be ready to be disconnected if you are on an SSH connection.

$ make
$ sudo make install

Now you need to update SELinux policy since /usr/sbin/sshd tries to write to user’s home directory, which is not allowed by default SELinux policy. The following commands will do. If you are not using SELinux, skip this step.

$ sudo grep sshd /var/log/audit/audit.log | audit2allow -M mypol
$ sudo semodule -i mypol.pp

Next, open a PAM configuration file for SSH (/etc/pam.d/sshd) with a text editor, and comment out the following line (to disable password authentication).

#auth       substack     password-auth

and add the following two lines (to enable one-time password authentication):

auth       required     pam_otpw.so
session    optional     pam_otpw.so

Lire la suite…

Introduction

Before we proceed, it would be best to cover some basic user administration topics that will be very useful in later chapters. Adding Users

One of the most important activities in administering a Linux box is the addition of users. Here you’ll find some simple examples to provide a foundation for future chapters. It is not intended to be comprehensive, but is a good memory refresher. You can use the command man useradd to get the help pages on adding users with the useradd command or the man usermod to become more familiar with modifying users with the usermod command.

Who Is the Super User?

The super user with unrestricted access to all system resources and files in Linux is the user named root. This user has a user ID, of 0 which is universally identified by Linux applications as belonging to a user with supreme privileges. You will need to log in as user root to add new users to your Linux server.

Debian Note: When installing Ubuntu Linux systems, you are prompted to create a primary user that is not root. A root user is created but no password is set, so you initially cannot log in as this user. The primary user can become the root user using the sudo su - command that will be discussed later.

How To Add Users

Adding users takes some planning; read through these steps below before starting:

1) Arrange your list of users into groups by function. In this example there are three groups “parents“, “children” and “soho“.

Parents    Children     Soho
Paul       Alice        Accounts
Jane       Derek        Sales

2) Add the Linux groups to your server:

[root@bigboy tmp]# groupadd parents
[root@bigboy tmp]# groupadd children
[root@bigboy tmp]# groupadd soho

3) Add the Linux users and assign them to their respective groups

[root@bigboy tmp]# useradd -g parents paul
[root@bigboy tmp]# useradd -g parents jane
[root@bigboy tmp]# useradd -g children derek
[root@bigboy tmp]# useradd -g children alice
[root@bigboy tmp]# useradd -g soho accounts
[root@bigboy tmp]# useradd -g soho sales

If you don’t specify the group with the -g, RedHat/Fedora Linux creates a group with the same name as the user you just created; this is also known as the User Private Group Scheme. When each new user first logs in, they are prompted for their new permanent password.

4) Each user’s personal directory is placed in the /home directory. The directory name will be the same as their user name.

[root@bigboy tmp]# ll /home
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Jul 24 20:04 lost found
drwx------ 2 accounts soho 1024 Jul 24 20:33 accounts
drwx------ 2 alice children 1024 Jul 24 20:33 alice
drwx------ 2 derek children 1024 Jul 24 20:33 derek
drwx------ 2 jane parents 1024 Jul 24 20:33 jane
drwx------ 2 paul parents 1024 Jul 24 20:33 paul
drwx------ 2 sales soho 1024 Jul 24 20:33 sales
[root@bigboy tmp]#

Lire la suite…

In order to log in to a MySQL server, you can run mysql command along with your login credentials and server’s IP address as arguments. For example:

$ mysql -u $MYSQL_ROOT -p $MYSQL_PASS -h 192.168.10.1

However, besides the inconvenience of typing extra arguments, using plain-text login credentials in a command line like above is really not a secure way to access a MySQL server. In a multi-user Linux environment, what you type in command line can easily be revealed to others who happen to run ps on the same host at the same time.

MySQL offers a way for you to log in to MySQL server without password, by using an external MySQL configuration file. In Linux, there are two different kinds of MySQL configuration files: (1) /etc/my.cnf and (2) ~/.my.conf. While any system-wide MySQL configuration is defined in /etc/my.cnf, any user-specific MySQL configuration is stored in ~/.my.cnf. You can leverage ~/.my.cnf, to define your MySQL login credential in the file.

$ vi ~/.my.cnf

[client]
user=alice
password=alice_passwd
host=192.168.10.1

Make sure to have the configuration file readable to you only.

$ chmod 0600 ~/.my.cnf

Once ~/.my.cnf is created, simply typing mysql command will let you log in to 192.168.10.1 as alice, and you no longer need to provide login password separately.

Source: Xmodulo

Que ce soit lors de la première installation ou après la perte du mot de passe principal de MySQL, il est nécessaire de pouvoir modifier le mot de passe administrateur (root) de MySQL.

Pour pouvoir modifier le mot de passe root de MySQL, il faut pouvoir s’y connecter, Or, si vous n’avez pas le mot de passe root actuel, vous vous retrouvez alors dans une situation kafkaïenne. Si vous connaissez le mot de passe actuel de MySQL et que vous souhaitez juste changer le mot de passe root, vous pouvez sauter cette étape ! Lire la suite…

Source: faqforge.com

If you lost your ISPConfig 3 administrator password, you can reset it with the following SQL query.

UPDATE sys_user SET passwort = md5(‘admin’) WHERE username = ‘admin’;

The SQL query sets the password to “admin” for the user “admin”, it has to be executed in the ISPConfig mysql database, e.g. with phpmyadmin. If you dont have phpmyadmin installed, then the query can be executed with the mysql commandline utility as well:

Login to the mysql database.

mysql -u root -p

and enter the password of the mysql root user. To switch to the ISPConfig database, run this command:

use dbispconfig;

Now execute the SQL command:

UPDATE sys_user SET passwort = md5(‘admin’) WHERE username = ‘admin’;

and close the mysql shell:

quit;