This is the final summary of our 2021 security hardening holiday calendar. We wanted to provide educational, useful, and actionable security advice, and we’re really pleased with the reception! Thank you for reading and following along.
Week 1-3 summary (1-21/25) We posted summaries for the 3 first weeks of the calendar:
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Enforce specific list of allowed sudoers (22/25) As discussed previously, the root user and sudo tool provide a lot of access to the system, both in terms of making changes, and reading sensitive data.
This december, we are posting security advice and modules, every day until December 25th. Now, it’s December 21st, and we’ve gotten through most of the security hardening holiday calendar:
Week 1 & 2 summary (1-14/25) We posted summaries for the 2 first weeks of the calendar:
Week 1 Week 2 Disable prelinking (15/25) A technique called prelinking can be used to optimize programs, making them start up faster. As this feature will change the binary file, it interferes with security functionality such as checksumming and signatures.
This december, we are posting security advice and modules, every day until December 25th. Now, it’s December 14th, and we’ve gotten to the fourteenth day of the security hardening holiday calendar:
Week 1 summary (1-7/25) If you didn’t see it yet, we posted a summary last week. Click here to read the security tips for day 1-7.
Non-root users with uid 0 (8/25) On most UNIX-like systems, there is a user called root, with an ID number 0 (uid).
Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.19.0! In 2021, for this release, and the launch of CFEngine Build, our focus has been on collaboration. We want to deliver a lot of value to our users through modules, and enable you to share and cooperate on policy, promise types, compliance reports, etc. CFEngine 3.19 is not an LTS release, so the intention for us is to give you a chance to start testing and giving feedback on the new features we are developing, before they land in an LTS version next year.
This year we decided to provide security focused modules and content for the holiday season. These are parts of the security configuration we implement on our own infrastructure, based on OpenSCAP and other sources. By putting these into easy to use modules and writing about it, we hope to give our community of users something valuable: Educational and easy to understand security tips, along with configuration which can quickly be automated across your entire infrastructure, using CFEngine.
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.15.5 and 3.18.1! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates.
What’s new In addition to bug fixes, some smaller features and improvements were added to 3.18.1. These additions are focused on the Mission Portal UI and API, and were added due to user feedback.
Enterprise APIs The new API endpoint - /api/hosts/deleted can be used to list previously deleted hosts.
Earlier this year, we hinted at what we were working on - a place for users to find and share reusable modules for CFEngine. Today, the CFEngine team is pleased to announce the launch of CFEngine Build:
The new website, build.cfengine.com, allows you to browse for modules, and gives you information about how to use each one of them. When you’ve found the module you were looking for, it can be downloaded and built using the command line tooling.
Using modules, you can add custom promise types to CFEngine, to manage new resources. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce some of the first official modules, namely git and systemd promise types. They were both written by Fabio Tranchitella, who normally works on our other product, Mender.io. He decided to learn some CFEngine and within a couple of weeks he’s contributed 3 modules, showing just how easy it is to implement new promise types.
Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.18.0! The focus of this new version has been extensibility. It also marks an important event, the beginning of the 3.18 LTS series, which will be supported for 3 years.
Several new features have been added since the release of CFEngine 3.15 LTS, in the form of non-LTS releases. In this blog post we’ll primarily focus on what is new in 3.
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.12.7 and 3.15.4! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates.
Changelogs As always, you can see a full list of changes and improvements in our changelogs:
3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise 3.12.7 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework 3.15.4 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.15.4 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise 3.15.4 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework Please note that the Enterprise changelogs contain only changes specific to enterprise.
