Practical UNIX Security Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 1

Practical UNIX Security - Assignment Example There are various versions of Unix available however they are slightly different. The most admired varieties of Unix are GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris and MacOS X (Rosen Kenneth H., 2006). UNIX security is the way of protecting a UNIX or any other Unix-like operating system (Ross Seth T., 2000). A safe atmosphere cannot be obtained by just designing conception of these operating systems but by observant administrative and user practices. LDAP that is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is nothing but an application protocol used for editing and reading directories over an internet protocol network (Morimoto Rand, 2008). Directory here refers to the set of organized records, for instance, a telephone directory is organized in an alphabetical record of people and organizations with the address and contact number in every record. LDAP not only stores information about persons but is also used to find encryption certificates, printers, pointers and other various services on a network. It also facilitates single signon where a single password for an operator is shared among various services. The LDAP is most suitable for any type of directory in cases where in-frequent updates and quick lookups are the requirements. As it is a protocol, LDAP does not describe how programs work on server side as well as on the client side. It defines the language used as communication for client programs to speak to servers. On the side of client, a client may be having an address book, an email program, or it can be a printer browser. The server may use only LDAP or may have various other ways for data exchange and LDAP could just an add-on method. Suppose if someone has an email program it may or may not supports LDAP. Most of the LDAP clients have option of reading from a server only. Apart from this, search abilities are also different for different users. Few of the clients have option of updating or writing information however LDAP does not provide security or encryption so addition al protection like encrypted SSL connection becomes imperative (Ciampa Mark, 2008). LDAP offers number of features which is difficult to understand at a glance. Below given are some of the features of LDAP. Remote Communications: Sometimes Remote communication can be or sometimes it cannot be a security issue (Negus Christopher, 2009). If unlimited access is provided to non-sensitive LDAP records then the security of data becomes doubtful. In such situation one possibly become susceptible to do’s and don’t do’s assault through cruel LDAP query loads. However it is not that important but still it should be taken care of. You may choose to operate using simple clear text passwords and without using any additional security if you are sure that all the LDAP communications will occur inside trusted network only. However in such cases it becomes easier to scrutinize sensitive data or to sniff traffic or obtain passwords sent in clear. The risk of sniffing, snooping, m an in the middle and other various risks increase when a communication takes place across a non reliable network. The increasing emphasis on monitoring (cn=monitor) and run-time configuration (RTC) may make it a rule that LDAP browsers develop into the remote consoles to administers LDAP server (Kopper Karl, 2005). This traffic is highly sensitive by its nature. The next step depends upon the answer to the question that do we need to protect password