OS Hardening and Policy Deployment overview

OS Hardening is the process of securing an operating system (OS) by reducing its attack surface and minimizing security vulnerabilities. This involves configuring the system to eliminate unnecessary services, closing unused ports, enforcing strict access controls, and applying security patches.

Typical tasks of OS Hardening

• Disable Unnecessary Services/Ports
• Patch and Update Regularly
• Configure Firewall and Network Security
• User Access Control
• File and Directory Permissions
• Log and Audit System Activity
• Secure Authentication
• Kernel and Application Hardening
  
  

Policy Deployment involves implementing security policies and compliance standards across an organization’s IT infrastructure to ensure consistent and secure operations.

• Typical Aspects of Policy Deployment
• Define Security Policies
• Automate Policy Enforcement
• User Access and Privilege Policies
• Patch and Vulnerability Management Policy
• Data Encryption and Protection Policies
• Incident Response and Monitoring
• Compliance Auditing and Reporting

Use IBM DevOps Deploy on OS Hardening and Policy Deployment

In modern IT environments, maintaining system security and compliance is crucial for ensuring the smooth operation of enterprises. However, performing OS Hardening (operating system hardening) and Policy Deployment (security policy enforcement) manually is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. Automating these processes allows organizations to achieve higher efficiency and security while ensuring compliance with industry standards.

IBM DevOps Deploy (formerly known as UrbanCode Deploy) is a powerful tool that automates the deployment and management of applications, infrastructure configurations, and security policies. It plays a critical role in automating OS Hardening and Policy Deployment, ensuring that systems remain secure, compliant, and efficiently managed.

1. Automation Increases Efficiency
    •    IBM DevOps Deploy automates the tedious and repetitive tasks involved in OS hardening and security policy enforcement.
    •    It reduces the time required to configure security settings across multiple systems, allowing system administrators to focus on higher-value tasks.
    •    Automation speeds up deployments and minimizes downtime, ensuring faster implementation of security configurations.

2. Eliminates Human Errors
    •    Manual system configuration is prone to errors and inconsistencies, which can lead to security vulnerabilities.
    •    IBM DevOps Deploy standardizes and automates configuration processes, reducing the risk of misconfigurations and ensuring that best practices are consistently applied.
    •    It enforces strict version control and validation before applying changes to critical systems.

3. Audibility and Reporting
    •    IBM DevOps Deploy provides detailed logs and audit trails for all deployments, policy changes, and security configurations.
    •    This ensures that all changes are traceable, allowing organizations to maintain compliance with industry standards such as CIS, NIST, and ISO 27001.
    •    The built-in environment dashboards, reporting and audit capabilities make it easier for security teams to monitor and verify system configurations.

4. Visibility into Configuration and Changes
    •    With centralized management and monitoring, IBM DevOps Deploy gives complete visibility into system configurations and policy deployments.
    •    Administrators can track which configurations were applied, when they were deployed, and who authorized the changes.
    •    Real-time visibility helps identify and remediate misconfigurations quickly, ensuring that systems remain in a hardened and secure state.

5. Seamless Release Management and governance
    •    IBM DevOps Deploy supports release automation with version control, enabling organizations to safely test and deploy hardened configurations.
    •    It ensures that only verified and approved security policies are deployed, reducing the risk of introducing vulnerabilities during updates.
    •    Release pipelines can be configured to enforce rollback mechanisms, ensuring a safe fallback if an issue is detected.

Solution architecture design

Topology

• Every Host has an agent installed
• Agent connect to server directly, but via a relay is the best practice
• Agent can use floating license to save license
• Os hardening tasks are controlled and triggered by DevOps Deploy server and executed by Agent in every host

 Key Concepts in IBM DevOps Deploy

Just in case you are not familiar with IBM DevOps Deploy, here is some key concepts:

1️⃣ Component
    •    A Component is a logical representation of an application artifact (such as code, binaries, configuration files, or scripts).
    •    It defines what needs to be deployed and includes instructions for how to deploy it.
    •    Components can be versioned to maintain different builds.

2️⃣ Version
    •    A Version is a snapshot or a specific build of a component that can be deployed.
    •    Each version contains the required artifacts and metadata to perform deployments.
    •    It allows tracking and rollback of deployments if needed.

3️⃣ Component Process
    •    A Component Process defines the steps to deploy, configure, or uninstall a component.
    •    It includes tasks like copying files, running scripts, modifying configurations, or restarting services.
    •    Processes can be customized and reused across environments.

4️⃣ Environment
    •    An Environment represents the target infrastructure where the component is deployed.
    •    It can be a development, testing, staging, or production environment.
    •    Environments are associated with different configurations and properties.

5️⃣ Environment Properties
    •    Environment Properties are configuration values specific to an environment.
    •    They can include database connections, API endpoints, and other environment-specific settings.
    •    Properties ensure that the same component behaves differently in different environments.

6️⃣ Component Properties
    •    Component Properties define the settings and parameters that are used when deploying a component.
    •    These properties can be static or dynamically assigned at runtime.
    •    They help customize the behavior of the component in different contexts.

7️⃣ Version Properties
    •    Version Properties are attributes associated with a specific version of a component.
    •    They may include build information, deployment date, or environment-specific settings.
    •    Version properties help track metadata and facilitate version control.

Modelling

Let's talk about how to modelling the implementations.

Application

You can have one or multiple applications for these tasks. But the focus is component level. Even you have only one Application called "OS hardening", it's OK.

Environments

In your application, you will have multiple environments. You can have each target host represented by one environment, but if your organization is not very small, it will cost you a lot of effect to deploy/configure/manage them. It's not a good approach normally.

Because every configuration/hardening task is triggered from environment level, the suggestion is to organize your agents into groups, each group represented by one environment. The division of group can be flexible. The popular ones are organized by:

• physical model/specification of servers;
• Operation System of servers;
• Logical usage of servers (like dev server or production servers);
• project or teams

Actually, it can be a mix of several ways together.

Components

Once you have Application and environments, you need to define the components. Component will used as tasks logical "container". You can define a component for one or one group of related tasks of OS hardening. You can have multiple components for OS hardening. The number could be 5-20. Because the number too big will create too many components to manage by administrators.

These can be a candidate of components:

• A windows Release
• Firewall operations
• Java Runtime
• OS users and permissions
• OS local services
• .etc

Now you have the component as a logic container for the operations, we need the define "how" to configure.

Components Process

Component process is where you define your logic to configure and harden something. 

After we know "how" to configure, we need to know what to configure. There are 2 different ways to use

versioned configuration task (Component Version)

If some configuration is versioned, like you want to upgrade your Java to a new version.

The version we can used is the Component Version. In one version, there is one or multiple assets existing. The assets can stored in DevOps Deploy code-station, but the better way is to stored in some external repository, to save the storage of DevOps Deploy Codestation, because they may be very huge. The asset is stored in external repository, with only a link or ID saved in a Component Version as the placeholder.

Assets can be:

• installation media
• executable scripts
• json/xml as definitions
• .etc

To implement the configuration, Component Process will download the asset into target server locally, then install/configure according to logic defined in Component Process. If needed, the Component Process is also can be part of the asset in one version, as kind of logic-as-code. So you can use new logic to run the new release media, and old logic to run old media installation. 

Version is not only the difference from the tools version (like JRE version), but also include some logic versions. Like your team want to introduce some security standard which involving a bunch of rules. Because this kind of rules may vary from time to time, so there will be different "version" of the rules. So this kind of logic version is also suitable to be represented by Component Versions.

A special asset is the Version Properties. Version Properties is a part of individual version, and can have different value from different versions. Component Process can configure the server according to the value of the properties. 

non-versioned configuration task

Some configuration is not version-related. Normally they are version straightforward and simple.  For example, you just care whether the port 389 is disabled. In this kind of configuration, you can use Environment properties to represent it. You can set a "Component Environment property" in your components' "Environment Property Definitions" UI. So this property will be forced to exist in every environment with this Component included.

To implement this configuration, you can manually modify the environment property of one environment, then trigger a deployment. Component Process doesn't need to download asset for this, just red the property and do the configuration. 

Pros and cons:

• Environment Properties is easy to use, but if there are too many individual environment properties, it cause management problem.
• Another problem is that you can easily see which version has been deployed in which environment quickly, with a quick look at the dashboard of environments.  But it doesn't give you the detail information like Environment Properties quickly, unless you click into each Environment one by one to check.

Complete versions vs Incremental versions

In IBM DevOps Deploy (formerly UrbanCode Deploy), managing versions is critical for ensuring that applications and configurations are delivered efficiently and consistently. There are two key types of versions:

⸻

✅ 1. Complete Version

A Complete Version includes all the necessary files, artifacts, and configurations required to fully deploy or redeploy a component.

⸻

📦 Characteristics of a Complete Version:
    •    Full Package: Contains the entire set of artifacts and configuration files required for deployment.
    •    Replaces Previous Deployments: A complete version replaces the previous version, ensuring a fresh, clean state during the deployment.
    •    Used for Major Releases: Often used during major updates or when significant changes have been made to the application or configuration.
    •    Independent of Previous Versions: It does not depend on any previous versions, making it a standalone deployment package.

⸻

🎯 Use Case for Complete Version:
    •    Deploying a brand-new application or environment.
    •    Rolling out major updates where all existing components should be replaced.
    •    Ensuring a clean state by removing old files and configurations.

⸻

🔁 2. Incremental Version

An Incremental Version contains only the changes made since the last deployed version. It focuses on applying the differences rather than redeploying everything.

⸻

📦 Characteristics of an Incremental Version:
    •    Change-Only Package: Contains only modified, added, or deleted files since the last version.
    •    Faster Deployment: Since only the changes are deployed, incremental versions typically result in faster deployments and reduced downtime.
    •    Preserves Previous Versions: Keeps previously deployed artifacts intact while applying updates.
    •    Dependent on Previous Versions: It relies on the baseline of the previous version to maintain consistency.

⸻

🎯 Use Case for Incremental Version:
    •    Pushing small updates or patches to production.
    •    Deploying configuration changes that do not require a full redeployment.
    •    Reducing deployment time and minimizing the impact on the system.

For example, you can use complete version for normal versioning, but you can use incremental version for patches and hot fixes which doesn't have dependency on each other, only depends on the major release (Complete Version). 

If you deploy a major version 1.1 to Java Runtime,  the Environment dashboard will show you one environment has Java Runtime deployed with version 1.1;

Then you deployed a patch name "1236 Memory Security patch" to Java Runtime, the Environment dashboard will show you one environment has Java Runtime deployed with version 1.1 + "1236 Memory Security patch"

After you deployed another patch named "1394 Memory fixpack" to Java Runtime, the Environment dashboard will show you one environment has Java Runtime deployed with version 1.1 + "1236 Memory Security patch" + "1236 Memory Security patch"

After you got a new release 1.2 of Java Runtime, which contains all the hotfixs, you will deploy a new complete version 1.2 and remove all other incremental versions contained by 1.2. So the Environment dashboard will show you one environment has Java Runtime deployed with version 1.1 

Note: don't keep too many incremental versions, which will increase your management effort. Merge incremental version into a complete version and replace them in environments.

Deploy

In your deployment, you can select the group of hosts (it's the environment) to configure the OS hardening. You can select which component(s) to configure in one deployment. You can select the right version for the component(s).

Rollback

Deploy:

Delivers a new version of the application to the target environment, either as a full or incremental deployment.
Ensures that artifacts, configurations, and processes are applied correctly.

Rollback:

Reverts the system to a previous stable version if the current deployment fails or introduces issues.
Restores previous application versions, configurations, and environment properties to maintain system stability.

Different code deployment, deploy and rollback is not very important to OS hardening, because normally the result of OS hardening operation is more predictable. So I suggest to use the "redeploy" as the rollback. It means after your new version deployed, you can deployed the previous version again to override it. But this require your component can be re-run without the consideration of clean the version deployed.

Or you can use the formal rollback approach provide by DevOps Operation. You can remove one individual Incremental Version, or rollback to previous version. You need to provide the uninstall process to remove the current version.

Visibility

After deployment, from the Environment dashboard, you can see which component has been configured in which environment. And you can see which version was used to configured. Also you can see whether there is an error during the configuration from dashboard.