The Bastille Hardening program enforces security policies and "locks down" an operating system to prevent unauthorized access or attacks.
The Bastille Hardening program offers a unique advantage of allowing users and administrators to select precisely how to harden their operating systems. For instance, in its default hardening mode, the program interacts with users and asks them questions designed to educate them on security matters, explain the topics of their inquiries, and then build a policy based on their answers. In contrast, the assessment mode generates a report aimed at informing the user about available security measures, as well as providing insights into which settings have been tightened.
The Bastille Hardening program broke new ground by endeavoring to educate users and administrators on security and helping them make informed and practical choices that align with the actual security requirements of their systems. Bastille's secondary goal of providing educational value has, in many cases, been as useful or even more useful than its primary goal of hardening systems. As a result, some organizations have adopted an interactive Bastille hardening session as part of their training regimen for new system administrators, which promotes an optimum user experience.
Bastille has become a vital component of the security hardening space, particularly for Linux and HP-UX systems. It is considered the most used hardening tool for these systems and is shipped by vendors such as SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, and HP-UX. Bastille has been covered extensively in various security books on Linux, and several articles have been written on its utility. Recently, the Center for Internet Security's Linux Hardening Guide also endorsed Bastille as a crucial tool to help harden systems.
Finally, the release of Bastille Hardening 2021 comes with an update that covers Fedora Core 5, SUSE 10, Mandriva 10.0, 10.1, 2006*, and includes preliminary support for Tiger. These new features will ensure that Bastille Hardening remains relevant and useful to modern security requirements.
Version 3.2.1: N/A