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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Could anyone quickly explain how partitioning helps with security?

Also, as the guide mentions, it's possible to mount the partitions with different options. As the following (all mentioned in the HowTo, excerpts from "man mount"):

  noexec Do not allow direct execution of any binaries on the mounted filesystem.  (Until recently it was possible to run binaries  anyway using a command like /lib/ld*.so /mnt/binary. This trick fails since Linux 2.4.25 / 2.6.0.)

  nosuid Do not allow set-user-identifier or set-group-identifier bits to take effect. (This seems safe, but is in fact rather unsafe ifyou have suidperl(1) installed.)

  nodev  Do not interpret character or block special devices on the file system.

Of course this is just one less (perhaps improbable) attack vector. Never the less; many of the mentioned partitions should never have these kind of files unless it's for a malicious purpose.

Edit: fixed pre and clarification

A common way for an attacker to get root access after exploiting a service and getting accesses on that service's user account is to download some additional tools to tmp. Since no one should be running programs from tmp, turning exec off hopefully gives an attacker with a compromised daemon account no place to download code that they can then execute.

locking your filesystems helps you sometimes

take /var/log as example. if someone floods your server with traffic and you log every tiny bit (or even worse you have the debug level set to on) the logs will quickly take lots of space. if the space is full no further write access is possible

if it's a seperate partition you can't write more logs... if it's on the same partition you won't be able to log in by ssh as example because your drive is full and you can't spawn the sshd agent ;)

This one is worth doing. I've been asked to fix a Trixbox that was blocking calls because they were logging every phone call and it filled up the harddrive. Easy solution to a possibly annoying problem.

I really hope we can get to a new generation of filesystems soon. Something closer to what ZFS is now. It frustrates me that I have an 80GB disk and I have to allocate portions of it to each of these tasks and try to correctly estimate in advance what each one will use. Eventually it will turn out I mis-estimated and it will be a pain to juggle already-filled partitions.

With a system like ZFS, you create logical filesystems essentially at a folder level. So you can say that /tmp is noexec and has a quota of 20GB but a reserved space of 2 GB. You can also make sure that your root drive has at least 10GB reserved, so even if /var fills up, you still have at least 10GB for your root space.

And this is without heavyweight partitioning, things are easily modifiable on the fly, and you still get constant-time snapshots.

Fortunately, logical volume managers exist and do help.

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