A webserver usually is the primary target to intrude into any network. If you provide web hosting services for your customers you have to provide them with a lot of features to make them happy. The main requirement for any hosting provider is PHP, probably the widest spread web scripting language out there.

Some customers only start to get happy if you give them PHP without any safe_mode restrictions, if you provide them with custom CGI scripting next to the basic good old SSI features (which in my eyes no one really needs since we got PHP) by Apache HTTP Server, if you give them FTP access and let them manage their account by themselves.

In every feature there is always a hidden security risk. We cannot give all this to our customers without thinking about security and its consequences if a user gets hold of data which does not belong to himself or even breaks into the whole system. So, let’s start at the basics: No customer should be able to see any other running processes on the system except the ones that belong to himself. We want to hide all processes that the given customer is not allowed to see. That’s process hiding. And because on a Linux box it’s always smart to implement something from bottom up, we name it kernel based.

There is no simple solution for this problem. Some rootkits simply overwrite the ‘ps’ command. But we want something more trustworthy, somehow deeper anchored in the system (got that?). The only kernel patch I found was the one from RSBAC.org (Rule Set Based Access Control), a full blown kernel security patch. The only feature we actually need is “CAP process hiding”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally I managed to totally redesign iezzi.ch. I gave up on my own site design which was on the net since January 2004. At that time I was already using Wordpress as backend to manage my content. But as it got cluttered up so heavily by my own source code modifications it was nearly impossible to ever upgrade it. Also, iezzi.ch was not really a weblog. I somehow abused Wordpress as a CMS and did not use any of it’s blogging capabilities. Its content has not been updated for years.

Starting with this redesign I would like to get again more active and publish some technical articles in the near future. You will find a lot about Linux system management and PHP programming coming up here. Also I would like to keep this site as my personal homepage like the first days on the net. Whether it’s silly or not, everybody needs his personal homepage.

My picture gallery and guestbook got separated from this site. As soon as I find some time I am going to integrate them again smoother.

Enjoy!