A Way Forward

Carbon Black recently published a report on the challenges of securing Linux-based operating systems and how Carbon Black is redesigning the approach. For more information about how the Cb Predictive Security Cloud, Carbon Black’s consolidated endpoint security platform, helps enterprises cut costs and realize significant business benefits, check out our webinar The Business Benefits and Cost Savings of Switching to the CB Predictive Security Cloud.

Until now, there hasn’t been a security tool that sufficiently answers the list of questions we assembled. In fact, there hasn’t even been a security vendor that asks these questions. Despite basic flaws in reasoning, the approach of solving for Windows and porting to Linux has been presented by vendors across the security space as a reasonable strategy.

We believe it is time, as vendors, security professionals, and security-conscious organizations, to collectively take a step back and rethink the status quo. To start that conversation, we’ve uncovered some assumptions about the existing approach and identified how they are flawed. We’ve also examined the context around Linux security challenges in order to construct a sample set of questions that can be used to more effectively evaluate security offerings. Based on our list of questions, we derived four key design principles that must be present in an effective Linux security offering, namely:

• DO NO HARM

• SPEED UP DELIVERY CADENCE

• VALUE BREADTH OF COVERAGE OVER DEPTH OF FUNCTIONALITY WITHIN A SPECIFIC DISTRIBUTION

• GIVE CUSTOMERS OWNERSHIP OF THE RISK/REWARD DIAL

Our time of accepting fundamentally flawed security tools needs to come to an end. We believe the only way to move forward is to take a careful, inquisitive approach. Starting from the ground up, we must first examine the context around what we wish to secure. Within that context, we need to identify driving questions and design principles that fulfill those questions.

Lastly, we need to build and adopt modern security tools that adhere to these design principles. Only then can we enable organizations to effectively secure their ever-growing landscape of Linux machines.

The goals of this whitepaper are to bring light to the flaws with porting Windows security approaches to Linux, identify unique challenges with securing Linux infrastructure, introduce a list of questions one can use to better evaluate a Linux security offering, and propose a core set of design principles on which strong Linux security offerings can be built.

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Thanks for joining us as we explored “Re-designing Linux Security: Do No Harm” our report on the challenges of securing Linux-based operating systems in the modern era.

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