Security guide and security configuration checklist for RHEL 5

Who are they?

DoD: The United States Department of Defense (USDOD, DOD or DoD, initially briefly referred to as the National Military Establishment or NME) is the U.S. federal department charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government relating directly to national security and the United States armed forces.

NSA: The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S. government communications and information systems, which involves cryptanalysis and cryptography.

CIS: The Center for Internet Security (CIS) is a non-profit enterprise whose Benchmarking and Metrics Division helps organizations reduce the risk of business and e-commerce disruptions resulting from inadequate technical security controls. The Division provides enterprises with consensus best practice standards for security configurations, as well as resources for measuring information security status and for making rational decisions about security investments.

What are the purposes of the documents?

The purpose is to help organizations to reduce the risk. They recommend and provide settings, scripts, tools, benchmarks, metrics, principles and guides to configure and harden the operating systems more secure.

Topics from the documents

General principles, patches, packages and initial lockdown, minimize and secure xinetd network services (tftp, ftp, ssh, ldap, ntp, sendmail, postfix, bind, nfs, rpc, dovecot, samba, apache, squid, snmp, sql, x windows etc), minimize boot services, network parameter tuning, logging, file and directory permissions/access, system access, authentication and authorization, user accounts and environtment, warning banners, misc odds and ends, Selinux, network configuration and firewalls etc.

Where can I download them?

Click on the title to open or download.
DoD Consensus Security Configuration Checklist for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
The Center for Internet Security Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Benchmark
NSA Guide to Secure Configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Defense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
http://cisecurity.org/en-us/?route=default
http://nvd.nist.gov/ncp/DoD-RedHat-RHEL5-Settings.xls
https://www.cisecurity.org/tools2/linux/CIS_RHEL5_Benchmark_v1.1.pdf
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf