Most companies I’ve worked at where employees had a Microsoft work computers. They were under heavy control, even with admin privileges. I was wondering, for a corporate environment, how employees’Linux desktops could be kept under control in a similar way. What would be an open source or Linux based alternative to the following:
- policy control
- Software Center with software allow lists
- controlled OS updates
- zscaler
- software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
- antivirus
- VPN
I can think of a few things, like a company having it’s own software repos, or using an atomic distribution. There’s already open source VPN solutions if course. But for everything else I don’t really know what could be used or what setup we could have.
Most of this would probably be handled by the regular unix permissions and things like sudo access for commands that are needed. You can specify exactly what commands people can run using sudo. You can also make groups so that you can have people that can run certain commands in those groups. As far as default permissions to run files, that would be handled by your path and execute permissions. Same with umask settings. I worked at a large company and to my delight and a lot of windows users dismay, they forced us to have linux laptops for our particular jobs. I loved it, but a lot of people just weren’t happy. I found that I could do everything much easier when I had native tools for working with other unix based machines right there on my desktop.
Fun fact (that I just took advantage of in a CTF), sudo can also limit command line arguments. If you only want a user to restart a service but not stop it, you can restrict sudo to only
You can also use regex expressions. In our work env, we have specific id’s that are allowed to run certain commands. And only certain people have the ability to “sudo su - [authorized id]”. Then when you are using that id, you have commands you can run specific to the job. Also worth noting, those id’s are set to not allow login. You have to sudo to be able to get to the id.