Most companies I’ve worked at where employees had a Microsoft work computers. They were under heavy control, even with admin privileges. I was wondering, for a corporate environment, how employees’Linux desktops could be kept under control in a similar way. What would be an open source or Linux based alternative to the following:
- policy control
- Software Center with software allow lists
- controlled OS updates
- zscaler
- software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
- antivirus
- VPN
I can think of a few things, like a company having it’s own software repos, or using an atomic distribution. There’s already open source VPN solutions if course. But for everything else I don’t really know what could be used or what setup we could have.
Have a look at manage engine software
Well that’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!
That list makes me wanna get a job on a small company of up to 10-20 people, where none of these things are usually needed…
I hear you. But if we want Linux to seriously become the next desktop OS, I think it’s important to find something that gives large organisation some kind of way to manage their large IT inventory and users securely.
There’s Zscaler for Linux. We’re using it in our corpo.
You have to run your software mirror no matter what. Even if it’s a proxy mirror where you don’t actually store most of the packages.
SELinux/AppArmor for more granular access policies.
SSSD connects local auth with AD.
You should look into what your vendor has on offer, e.g. Landscape if you’re on Ubuntu.
As others have said config-as-code would probably be part of the equation too.
Zscaler is corporate spyware. As far as I know, it can log all connections, even ones that don’t go through the Zscaler nodes. It can also act as MITM proxy.
I’m doubtful about whether it’s (or at least many configurations of it) are legal in EU.
Sure. It’s certainly legal in NA and widely used. Any VPN can do that too. A corpo can install anything on their hardware and the hardware should be considered to be spying by default.
Oh and MITM proxying has been a fact of every corpo I’ve worked in. It’s the only way to reliably prevent people from accessing the list of sites the corpo doesn’t want accessed.
If you want to control users, don’t give them admin privileges.
Most of things you enumerated solve windows specific problems and therefore have no analogs in other OSes.
That’s the thing. They need some admin access. Especially if they’re working in IT and need to do certain tasks that require that privilege.
Allow only those tasks in policykit, make a link with
pkexec <tool>?No way. You completely trust them or you do not trust them at all. In any OS. That’s how security works.
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policy control
It’s not exactly the same, but you could use puppet to enforce configuration
Software Center with software allow lists
You can setup a custom repository with only approved software and then set that as the only one that the system is configured to retrieve packages from. This can also be controlled via puppet.
controlled OS updates
Same as the previous point. Upgrades are installed from the repos.
zscaler
I don’t know what that is/does, and their website isn’t helping.
software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
I’m pretty sure carbon black app control has a linux version.
antivirus
There are a number of different antivirus solutions for linux. A quick search will give you a bunch of lists. I’m not personally familiar with any of the options, but I don’t imagine it will be difficult to find one that will work for your use case.
A lot of points you mention can be achieved with Univention (a debian based central management environment) and a few extra steps. Should be possible, imho.
Neat! I’ll check it out.
All in all, i guess something like Fedora Silverblue (immutable) with some remote management software?
I was looking for what you said a few years ago out of curiosity before and remember looking into something called Shibboleth. I didn’t looked into it in details but it seems to cover identity and policy management. Not sure about the rest of the features you need though.
Nixos?
There are plenty of RMM tools/companies that support Linux platforms.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
What is ‘unallowed software’? A shell script the user wrote? Something they downloaded and compiled?
Limiting that seems fundamentally at odds with FOSS.
But not at odds with running a corporate environment.
Of course not, but you have to either trust your users to some extent or give them a system that’s locked down to the point of hindering them.
Granted most open source free software don’t have licenses that limit usage like many commercial software. You might want to keep track of the commercial software. Or look for versions that have important vulnerabilities.
First, you can run proprietary software on free software. So, running free software does not preclude license monitoring. It is also possible that certain licenses are not allowed even if they are approved by the FSF or OSI.
The goal more broadly is enforcing corporate policies around risk or whatever else needs to be enforced.
It may be that you HAVE to use certain kinds of software ( VPN was mentioned ). Perhaps you are NOT allowed to use certain software on work computers ( torrents and Steam clients come to mind ) or visit some kinds of websites.
The other risk that a company may want to monitor is ensuring software is up to date ( open source or not ). Stale software can have vulnerabilities that become attack vectors for the bad guys.
Finally there is access control, privileged access, and auditing. There may be systems or data that employees are not allowed to access or are only allowed to access under certain conditions.
I am not advocating anything here but it is totally normal for corporate IT to be tasked with limiting corporate risk and creating an auditable history of compliance. These are the kinds of tools and policies they use.
