Automated security hardening for Linux hosts with Ansible

ansible-hardening logo

What does the role do?

The ansible-hardening Ansible role uses industry-standard security hardening guides to secure Linux hosts. Although the role is designed to work well in OpenStack environments that are deployed with OpenStack-Ansible, it can be used with almost any Linux system.

It all starts with the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), part of the United States Department of Defense. The guide is released with a public domain license and it is commonly used to secure systems at public and private organizations around the world.

Each configuration from the STIG is analyzed to determine what impact it could have on a live production environment and how to implement it in Ansible. Tasks are added to the role that configure a host to meet the configuration requirement. Each task is documented to explain what was changed, why it was changed, and what deployers need to understand about the change.

Deployers have the option to pick and choose which configurations are applied using Ansible variables and tags. Some tasks allow deployers to provide custom configurations to tighten down or relax certain requirements.

OpenStack Summit Boston 2017 Talk

This talk covers the latest updates from the project and a live demo. Slides from the talk are available for download.

Releases

Deployers should use the latest stable release for all production deployments.

Train

  • Status: Latest stable release

  • STIG Version: RHEL 7 STIG Version 1, Release 3 (Published on 2017-10-27)

  • Supported Operating Systems:

    • CentOS 7

    • Debian 10 Buster

    • openSUSE Leap 15 and 15.1

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

    • Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic

Stein

  • Status: Latest stable release

  • STIG Version: RHEL 7 STIG Version 1, Release 3 (Published on 2017-10-27)

  • Supported Operating Systems:

    • CentOS 7

    • Debian 9 Stretch and 10 Buster

    • openSUSE Leap 15 and 15.1

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

    • Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic

Rocky

  • Status: Latest stable release

  • STIG Version: RHEL 7 STIG Version 1, Release 3 (Published on 2017-10-27)

  • Supported Operating Systems:

    • CentOS 7

    • openSUSE Leap 42.3

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

    • Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial and 18.04 Bionic

Queens

  • Status: Latest stable release

  • STIG Version: RHEL 7 STIG Version 1, Release 3 (Published on 2017-10-27)

  • Supported Operating Systems:

    • CentOS 7

    • Debian 8 Jessie

    • Fedora 26

    • openSUSE Leap 42.2 and 42.3

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (partial automated test coverage)

    • SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (experimental)

    • Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial

  • Documentation:

Pike

  • Status: Latest stable release (released: September 2017)

  • STIG Version: RHEL 7 STIG Version 1, Release 1 (Published on 2017-02-27)

  • Supported Operating Systems:

    • CentOS 7

    • Debian 8 Jessie

    • Fedora 26

    • openSUSE Leap 42.2 and 42.3

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (partial automated test coverage)

    • SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (experimental)

    • Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty (Deprecated)

    • Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial

  • Documentation:

Ocata

Newton