A recent change in the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF) is renaming bundle agent main to bundle agent mpf_main.
This change is intended to make it easier to run individual parts of your policy leveraging the library main bundle functionality (bundle agent __main__).
Library main bundles were first introduced in CFEngine 3.12.0. The functionality allows for the definition of bundle agent __main__. When this bundle definition is present in the policy entry (the first policy file that CFEngine reads) the bundle is understood to be used as the default bundlesequence.
Looking to be more efficient writing CFEngine policy?
Michael Bolen (Founder, CISOfy and author of Lynis) gives us some history on Lynis (including how to pronounce it, spoiler it’s “lee nus”). Nick Anderson (Doer of Things, Northern.tech) shows off reporting Lynis scan findings with CFEngine Enterprise and the lynis CFEngine build module.
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.
rxdirs has provided a convenient default when setting permissions recursively. When enabled (the default prior to version 3.20.0) a promise to grant read access on a directory is extended to also include execution since quite commonly if you want to read a directory you also want to be able to list the files in the directory. However, the convenience comes with the cost of complicating security reviews since the state requested on the surface is more strict than what is actually granted. This can both undermine the understanding of the desired state of the permissions as well as confidence that the policy accurately describes the resulting state and we have decided the convenience is not worth the cost.
The CFEngine engineering team has recently discovered two security issues in the CFEngine Enterprise product, specifically in the hub package:
CVE-2021-44215 - PostgreSQL log file world readable. CVE-2021-44216 - Apache and Mission Portal Application log files world readable. CVE-2021-44215 is a regression affecting currently supported versions 3.18.0 and 3.15.4 as well as some unsupported versions. CVE-2021-44216 affects all supported versions prior to 3.18.1 and 3.15.5 as well as some unsupported versions.
Interested in the efforts underway to make CFEngine manage the environment even faster?
Vratislav (Software Engineer) joins the show to talk about cf-reactor
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.
I re-stumbled across this mailing list post from Bryan Burke about some policy framework upgrade issues where he also asked about hooking in and customizing the update policy. I thought this sounded like a good opportunity for an example using a cfbs module. So, let’s take a look at making a cfbs module for a custom update policy.
As mentioned in the thread there are just a couple of things you need to do in order to hook in and customize the behavior of the update policy.
With the recent release of build.cfengine.com and cfbs I have been thinking about the process of converting a traditionally manged policy set. I consider a traditionally manged policy set one where you have a repo with the root of masterfiles being the root of the repository, or even having no repository at all and managing masterfiles by editing directly in the distribution point (e.g. /var/cfengine/masterfiles). Before jumping in with both feet and converting to a cfbs managed policy set you might want a hybrid situation where you can leverage some of the benefits of cfbs but without making drastic changes to the way policy is currently managed. That’s what this post is about, using cfbs with your traditionally manged policy set. Note: This post assumes that you already have cfbs installed and understand the basics of how it works. Check out our previous blog posts if you want to review how to get started with cfbs.
How can I work with secrets using CFEngine?
Craig (Digger) demoed cf-secret and how he uses it for protecting secrets used to mount LUKS encrypted drives.
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.
Looking for ways to improve the security of your infrastructure?
Craig (Digger) and Nick (Doer of Things) walk us through some of the policies shared during the 2021 CFEngine security holiday hardening calendar.
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.
The internet has been ablaze since the announcement of Log4Shell, the nickname for CVE-2021-44228, an arbitrary remote code execution vulnerability in the Java logging utility Log4j. So far two additional vulnerabilities (CVE 2021-45046, CVE-2021-45105) have been identified.
If you are interested in how the vulnerability works, this graphic from SecurityZines explains it well:
The code has been vulnerable since 2013 and millions of hosts and services are affected. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an emergency directive on December 17th, 2021 ordering all civilian federal agencies to take a series of measures to identify, patch, or mitigate vulnerable systems. Agencies have until 5pm EST on December 23rd, 2021 to comply with the requirements of the directive.
