A SERVER HARDENING FRAMEWORK

Abstract

There have been several attempts at  improving the security of servers in all the fields be it web servers like apache tomcat ,mail servers like wamp etc. Checklists have been made for different servers from time to time which contains a list of steps that have to be followed in order to improve the security of the particular server. So the user has to have all the basic knowledge about the server before he can make use of the checklist and secure the server. This is the first problem that the user has to be well versed in the basic technicalities of the server configuration before he can
secure it for use. Secondly ,till now there is no tool or framework that can bring all the different types of servers together under it so that a single framework can be used to harden or secure multiple number of servers and without any knowledge about the basic configuration of the servers. Hence, we propose to automate the server hardening process by creating a Framework which will be open source and hence new servers could be included in it by users by editing the open source code of the framework which would be in python language. A server hardening framework would help even a person with a layman understanding to secure the server which he is using. He would be able to use the framework for hardening a multiple types of servers as per his requirements. The Framework will provide an option of AUDITING as well as HARDENING. If the User chooses the AUDITING option , then the parameters of the server configuration file would be displayed along with the current values as well as it would be mentioned additionally for the parameters if a particular parameter requires hardening and again the user would be asked if he wants to harden it or not. In case of choosing hardening, the server configuration file would be replaced by hardened file and server be restarted.