The Linux Foundation's recently published security checklist may draw more attention to best practices for protecting Linux workstations, even if IT pros do not embrace all of its recommendations.

Konstantin Ryabitsev, the foundation's director of collaborative IT services, developed the list for the use of LF remote sysadmins, to harden their laptops against attacks. However, the foundation has not asked for universal adoption.

The document covers a variety of situations, and it includes explanations about why certain measures are necessary and how best to implement them.

"Checklists and best practices documents are how IT works internally. We are just taking an extra step of making generalized versions of these documents available to others under free documentation licenses, in hopes that they are useful to other teams. We have been doing this for months as part of our regular work," Ryabitsev told LinuxInsider.

Critical Protections

The security checklist strikes a balance between security decisions and usability issues, according to Ryabitsev. It categorizes security according to four severity levels: critical, moderate, low and paranoid.

Critical recommendations consist of implementations that should be mandated: for instance, enabling SecureBoot to prevent rootkits or evil maid attacks, and choosing a Linux distribution that supports native full disk encryption.

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