AnarchoTechNYC / ansible-role-common

An Ansible role providing a baseline, and hardened-by-default, configuration for managed nodes.

Anarcho-Tech NYC: Common

This role provides a hardened-by-default baseline configuration for Ansible-managed nodes. Notably, this role has been tested with Raspbian on Raspberry Pi hardware. This role's purpose is to make it simple to prepare a host to function as any kind of server that can be securely managed using additional Ansible roles.

Hardened baselines

This role incorporates a number of security considerations that are not often found in "out-of-the-box" configurations. Special attention has been paid to ensure these security considerations function as intended on Raspberry Pi hardware. These considerations include:

• Recent Linux kernel with AppArmor LSM loaded and enabled, either via GRUB default boot menu entry or compiled-in when running on Raspberry Pi hardware.
• Disk quota support enabled with configurable per-user or per-group disk utilization limits (on ext3, ext4, or xfs filesystems).
• 🚧 TK-TODO: Describe additional security considerations.

Role variables

• hardened_hosts: Boolean indicating whether or not to run baseline hardening tasks. Defaults to true.
• enable_root_fs_disk_quotas: Whether or not to turn on disk quotas for the root filesystem. Defaults to the value of hardened_hosts.

Hardened configuration

When hardened_hosts is true (the default), this role will perform baseline hardening tasks. You can further configure how the managed nodes will be hardened by setting any of the following variables:

• sshd_allow_group: Determines the Operating System user account to restrict SSH access. For example:

  hardened_hosts: true        # Perform system hardening.
  sshd_allow_group: ssh-users # Limit SSH access to users in the `ssh-users` group.

  If hardened_hosts is true but sshd_allow_group is undefined, system hardening will proceed but the procedure will not restrict SSH access by user group.
• disk_quotas_users: List of disk utilization limits imposed on a per-filesystem basis for a given Operating System user account. Each list item is a dictionary with the following structure:
  • name: The name of the user account to set a quota for.
  • block_soft: The soft limit for the amount of disk space that the given user can take up. Setting this to 0 means "no limit." The suffixes K, M, G, and T can be used to express kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes, and tebibytes, respectively. See the manual page for setquota(8) for more details.
  • block_hard: The hard limit for disk space used. The same semantics apply as for block_soft.
  • inode_soft: The soft limit for the number of files and directories that the given user can create. The same semantics apply as for block_soft.
  • inode_hard: The hard limit for number of files and directories created. The same semantics as above apply.
  • filesystem: The mount point of the filesystem to apply the quota on.
• disk_quotas_groups: List of disk utilization limits imposed on a per-filesystem basis for a given Operating System user group. Each list item is a dictionary whose structure is identical to the disk_quotas_users list items.

Configuring disk quotas

It is often important to impose disk utilization limits on a certain user account or user group to ensure that a rogue process or compromised service can not eat up all the available space on a given filesystem. This can be trivially configured with the disk_quotas_users and disk_quotas_groups lists. For example, this snippet will configure the server to allow the www-data user (the account under which a typical Web server runs) access to no more than 50 gibibytes of space on the default filesystem:

disk_quotas_users:
  - name: www-data
    block_hard: 50G