For the holiday season gift yourself an improved infrastructure security posture.
Join Craig, Cody, and Nick as they wrap up 2022 and the 20th episode of The Agent is In reviewing CFEngines’ 2022 Holiday Security Calendar which has advice picked straight from industry standard security hardening guides like the OpenSCAP Security Policies and Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). Craig demos new modules like maintainers-in-motd, file-permissions, enable-aslr, highlights guidance on writing your own security policies and more.
In the upcoming release of CFEngine 3.21.0 there is a change in behavior with respect to default permissions of created directories. From 3.21.0 and later directories will be created with read, write, execute permissions only for the file owner. No permissions are granted for group or other.
This change improves the default security posture to make sure that only the user executing cfengine (typically root) will have access to content in newly created directories.
File integrity monitoring is an important aspect in managing your infrastructure. Tripwire and AIDE are often cited as necessary tools by compliance frameworks1,2,3. Of course CFEngine can manage a file to make sure it contains desired content, but did you know that CFEngine also has the capability to simply monitor a file for change? In this blog post we take a look at CFEngines’ changes attribute for files promises.
File promises, changes body To monitor a file for change in CFEngine you must have a files promise with a changes body attached.
The next LTS is coming …
Join Cody Valle, Craig Comstock, Nick Anderson, and Ole Herman Elgesem for a preview of the coming in CFEngine 3.21.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
Links Connect on LinkedIn w/ Cody, Craig, Herman, or Nick All Episodes CFEngine 3.
On October 25th 2022 the OpenSSL project team announced 1 the forthcoming release of OpenSSL version 3.0.7. From the announcement we know that a fix will be made available on Tuesday November 1st, 2022 for a CRITICAL security issue.
Note: CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602 (X.509 Email Address Buffer Overflows) have been published 2. CVE-2022-3602 originally assessed as CRITICAL was downgraded to HIGH after further review prior to being published.
Affected versions The vulnerability is reported to affect version 3.
Do you know how to use every function available in CFEngine?
Join Cody, Craig, Herman to see how Nick uses org-mode, org-roam, and ob-cfengine3 to manage his personal collection of CFEngine Function Examples.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
Notes Live coded examples for the following functions:
Did you know that nightly builds of CFEngine are available?
cf-remote is the most convenient way to get nightly packages. If you’re not familiar with it, or if you need a refresher, check out our other blog posts about cf-remote.
Listing packages By default cf-remote list will emit a list of available releases and the URLs for the newest CFEngine Enterprise LTS release.
cf-remote list Available releases: master, 3.20.0, 3.18.x, 3.
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. How often do you verify your compliance? Once or twice a year? Have you considered reporting on compliance continually?
The usual suspects, Cody Valle (Head of community), Criag Comstock (Digger), and Nick Anderson (Doer of Things) see how CFEngine Enterprise can be used to implement and report on compliance, specifically the Ubuntu 20.
Ever wish that you could run Mission Portal at Home?
Some of the CFEngine team gathers in Oslo Norway to do the show live, together. Criag Comstock (Digger) demonstrates how to use cf-remote to access new ARM64 packages for CFEngine Enterprise (Hub and Clients) and experiments with CFEngine Build in Mission Portal.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees.
What’s autorun?
Autorun is a feature of the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF)1 that simplifies the process of adding and executing new policy.
We have talked about Modular policies with autorun and the Augments before. This time, we dig into autorun a bit deeper to explore some of its current features and look at how to implement your own as we did during The Agent is In, Episode 15 - Extending Autorun