Documentation Security Beat

Document is Final
The contents of this beat have been sent for translation for the GA version of the Release Notes. Any additional changes to this beat will not appear until after the release of Fedora 13. If you have zero-day changes, be sure to post a bug.

Dogtag Certificate System

Dogtag Certificate System (DGS) is an enterprise-class open source Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of certificate lifecycle management including Certificate Authority (CA), Data Recovery Manager (DRM), Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) Manager, Registration Authority (RA), Token Key Service (TKS), Token Processing System (TPS) and smartcard management, trough ESC (Enterprise Security Client).

Refer to Dogtag Certificate System for additional details.

modprobe Whitelist

modprobe Whitelist allows system administrators in high-security situations to limit the modules loaded by modprobe to a specific list of modules configured by the administrator, making it impossible for unprivileged users to exploit vulnerabilities in modules that are not ordinarily used by e.g. attaching hardware and so limit the amount of (potentially vulnerable) code that can run in the kernel.
modprobe can also run specified commands instead of loading a module (using the "install" configuration directive); this is restricted using the same whitelist as well. To help system administrators compile the whitelist, additional functionality is added to modprobe: it will be possible to log all information (similar to using "modprobe -v") to a specified file, including modprobe actions run in the dracut initrd. A script will be provided that compiles a proposed whitelist from the logged data.

If desired and configured by the system administrator, a significant reduction of the kernel-space attack surface, avoiding risk of vulnerabilities in rarely-used kernel-mode code: a sample desktop Fedora system currently has 79 modules loaded, out of 1964 available modules (4%). When counting code size, and the main kernel file (/boot/vmlinuz*) is included, the sample desktop system runs 8.36 MB of kernel-space code, out of 34.66 MB available (24%).

You may refer to the Modprobe Whitelist feature page on the Fedora wiki for a more complete description of this feature.

User Account Dialog

A new User Account Dialog is redesigned and implemented to create new users and edit user-related information in single-user systems or small deployments. This new dialog supersedes functionality that was previously available in a variety of tools, such as system-config-user, gnome-about-me, gdmsetup and polkit-gnome-authorization, and makes it available in one place.

User Account Dialog on the Fedora wiki includes more details.

Policy Kit One

Policy Kit One replaces the old deprecated Policy Kit and allows the KDE users to have a better experience of their applications and desktop in general. In Fedora 12 KDE Desktop Edition uses Gnome Authentication Agent, with Policy Kit One now is possible to utilize the native KDE authentication agent, KAuth.

For a complete description of this feature, refer to KDE PolicyKit One Qt on the Fedora wiki.