An Overview of Open Source Security - Other tools
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A wide range of additional security applications such as encryption tools, authenticators and packet sniffers are available under open source or other free licensing terms. In some cases these are the equivalent or superior to their commercial alternatives in terms of functionality and reliability. In other cases there may be disadvantages, for example development may be lagging behind the state of the art, or support might be lacking. Each of these tools must be evaluated case by case in order to evaluate whether it has a role to play within a given security setup.
GnuPG
Powerful but straightforward encryption is vital in the enterprise environment, where sensitive data such as client details, product information and employment records must be protected. This requirement can become critical when such data must be stored on laptops or removable hard drives and carried out of the secure corporate environment into the field. The Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) uses strong cryptography following the openPGP standard to sign and encrypt both emails and data on disk. GnuPG is free software released under the GNU General Public License.
Get it from: http://www.gnupg.org/download/index.en.html
OpenSSH
It’s easy to overlook the importance of secure communication between hosts over a network. Traditional console applications such as rlogin and telnet are wide open from a security point of view. OpenBSD Secure Shell (OpenSSH) addresses this by providing an open source alternative to the proprietary original SSH for authenticating, securing and encrypting TCP connection sessions. It includes utilities for data copying between hosts (RCP), FTP services (sftp and sftp-server) and key management (ssh-keysign, ssh-keyscan and ssh-keygen). OpenSSH is believed to be more secure than the original SSH.
Get it from: http://www.openssh.com/
Wireshark
A state of the art packet sniffer, Wireshark allows all data passed across many different types of network to be captured, dissected and analyzed. As well as capturing live data straight “from the wire,” it can examine packets that have been dumped to a file, either by its built-in dumpcap utility, or a third party capture program such as tcpdump. In many cases this is preferable, since in order to capture live data on certain platforms Wireshark must run with superuser privileges, which can present a security risk of its own.
Get it from: http://www.wireshark.org/
There are more open source and free security solutions available than an article such as this can cover in detail. Security website insecure.org has run surveys in 2000, 2003 and 2006 listing the top 100 security tools, and a browse through their listings reveals surprisingly large numbers of open source alternatives to the mainstream products. In many cases, open source solutions have topped or come close to topping their categories. A system administrator who needs to build a low cost, high quality security system should certainly consider incorporating free solutions into their setup. After all, open source security code is so ubiquitous that there’s a good chance they will do so whether they are aware of it or not.
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