Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9: Security baked in
Boston: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been the Linux for business for a generation now. Today, RHEL touches more than $13 trillion of the global economy. Remember when people used to think Linux couldn't handle big business? Ha! With the release of RHEL 9 at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat improved its offerings from the open hybrid cloud to bare metal servers to cloud providers and the farthest edge of enterprise networks.
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RHEL 9 Customers want better security, and Red Hat will deliver it. Beyond the usual RHEL hardening, testing, and vulnerability scanning, RHEL 9 incorporates features that help address hardware-level security vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown. This includes capabilities to help user-space processes create memory areas that are inaccessible to potentially malicious code. The platform provides readiness for customer security requirements as well, supporting PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and more.
Specific security features:
Smart Card authentication: Users can make use of smart card authentication to access remote hosts through the RHEL web console (Sudo, SSH, etc.).
Additional security profiles: You can improve your security intelligence gathering and remediation services such as Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite with security standards such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA.
Detailed SSSD logging: SSSD, the enterprise single-sign-on framework, now includes more details for event logging. This includes time to complete tasks, errors, authentication flow, and more. New search capabilities also enable you to analyze performance and configuration issues.
Integrated OpenSSL 3: It supports the new OpenSSL 3 cryptographic frameworks. RHEL's built-in utilities have been recompiled to utilize OpenSSL 3.
SSH root password login disabled by default: Yes, I know you ssh into your server with root passwords all the time. But it's never been a smart idea. By default, RHEL won't let you do this. Yes, this is annoying, but it's even more annoying to hackers trying to log in as `root` using brute force password attacks. All-in-all, this is a win in my book.
In this release, Red Hat also introduces Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) digital hashes and signatures. With IMA, users can verify the integrity of the operating system with digital signatures and hashes. With this, you can detect rogue infrastructure modifications, so you can stop system compromises in their tracks.
Red Hat is also adopting, via Kubernetes, Sigstore for signing artifacts and verifying signatures. Sigstore is a free software signing service that improves software supply chain security by making it easy to sign release files, container images, and binaries cryptographically. Once signed, the signing record is kept in a tamper-proof public log. The Sigstore will be free to use by all developers and software providers. This gives software artifacts a safer chain of custody that can be secured and traced back to their source. Looking ahead, Red Hat will adopt Sigstore in OpenShift. Podman and other container technologies.
This release has many new edge features. These include:
Comprehensive edge management, delivered as a service, to oversee and scale remote deployments with greater control and security functionality, encompassing zero-touch provisioning, system health visibility and more responsive vulnerability mitigations all from a single interface.
Automatic container roll-back with Podman, RHEL's integrated container management technology. This automatically detects if a newly-updated container fails to start. In this case, it then rolls the container back to the previous working version.
The new RHEL also includes an expanded set of RHEL Roles, These enable you to create specific system configurations automatically. So, for instance, if you need RHEL set up just for Postfix, high-availability clusters, firewall, Microsoft SQL Server, or a web console, you're covered.
Besides roles, RHEL 9 makes it easier to build new images: You can build RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 images via a single build nod. It also includes better support for customized file systems (non-LVM mount points) and bare-metal deployments.
If you're building Universal Base Image (UBI) containers, You can create them not only with standard UBI images but with micro, minimal, and init images as well. You'll need a fully subscribed RHEL 9 container host to do this. This enables you to pull additional RPMs from the RHEL 9 repositories.
RHEL now uses cgroup2 containers by default: Podman, Red Hat's drop-in daemonless container engine replacement for Docker, uses signature and short-name (e.g., ubi8 instead of registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi) validation by default when pulling container images.
And, of course, Red Hat being Red Hat, RHEL 9 Beta ships with GCC 11 and the latest versions of LLVM, Rust, and Go compilers. Looking ahead, Python 3.9 will also be RHEL 9's default version of Python.
Thinking of the console, the new RHEL also supports kernel live patching from the console. With this, you can apply patches across large, distributed system deployments without having to write a shell program. And, since it's live patching, your RHEL instances can keep running even as they're being patched.
Put it all together, and you get a solid business Linux for any purpose. Usually, we wait before moving from one major release to another. This time you may want to go ahead and jump to RHEL 9 sooner than later. The release will be available next week.