Local protection in Linux systems

Abstract

Local protection is a topic in System Administration, which is a knowledge area inside Computer Science. The aim of local protection is to configure a computer (or more specifically, the computer's operating system) in order to ensure that the computer is used by the right people and in the right way; or, more specifically, that: (1) only certain people (or users) can access the computer, and (2) when any user is working with the computer, this user cannot compromise, either accidentally or intentionally, the integrity of any other user's work or the system itself. In particular, this document introduces the local protection rules of Linux systems. Linux is an open-source operating system that belongs to a family of systems generally called Unix (please note that Unix also refers to a particular member of this family, but in this case, the registered mark UNIX(R) should be used instead). In this context, most of the concepts of this document not only apply to Linux but to the general Unix family, while some others are specific to Linux and, particularly, to some Linux distributions based on RedHat Linux (such as RedHat Enterprise, CentOS Linux, Fedora, etc.).