Using xattrs or Extended Attributes on Linux

What are extended attributes? Extended attributes or xattrs, are an extensible mechanism to store metadata on a filesystem. Metadata is a collection of information or data points about a particular object. If we would compare this article, the metadata contains the title, author, description, language, Twitter image, etc. Normally the file system can only store a limited set of information about files. Typically this is the filename, ownership, file permissions, and dates. By using extended attributes, we can describe more properties of the […]

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Securing mount points on Linux

Securing mount points Mount points are defined in /etc/fstab. They link a particular disk pointer to the related device (disk, partition or virtual device). By default the mount options are not focused on security, which gives us a room to further improve hardening of the system. This hardening is especially important considering our most precious data is stored here. Via mount options we can apply additional security controls to protect our data. Mount points Let’s have a look at our […]

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