SECURING LINUX BY HARDENING THE GRUB BOOT LOADER

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Download free Securing Linux by Hardening the Grub Boot Loader pdf ebook. A running server is prone to various types of security threats. We categorize them as

Local Security threats
Remote/Network Security threats

While there are many articles that have explained in great detail the Networking security threats and mechanisms to deal with it, there are a few that have also dealt with the local security aspect. These types of attacks primarily entail gaining illegal root access to an unattended system by running a brute-force password cracking program or by simply rebooting the system and passing some standard arguments to the boot loader program.

One of the frequently used methods to gain the superuser or root access is through the default boot loader that is used to initialize the main OS. In case of Linux, this can be either LILO (Linux Loader) or GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader).

The objective of this article is to give an insight into GRUB boot loader particularly from the security point of view. The initial part of the article talks the same while the latter part deals with the analysis and implementation of a patch to GRUB, with which one of the security breaches could be overcome. The GRUB version 0.93 has been considered in this study and we have been able to successfully create and test the patch on it.

Download Securing Linux by Hardening the Grub Boot Loader