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vSphere Security Hardening Report Script Updated for vSphere 5.1

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A public draft of the vSphere Security Hardening Guide for vSphere 5.1 was released a few weeks back by my colleague Mike Foley. Since then I have been asked by several people if I had a chance to update my vSphere Security Hardening Report Script. The answer was unfortunately no due to other projects I had been working on and this script as well as others are maintained outside of my normal day job. I finally found some time this past weekend to go through the 5.1 revision of the hardening guide and make the necessary updates to my script which includes a few additional checks.

The script continues to provide backwards compatibility to previous releases of the vSphere Security Hardening Guide for vSphere 5.0, 4.1 and 4.0. Maintaining this compatibility is actually quite a challenge due to small minor changes in the hardening guide from previous versions, but I am please to say the latest 5.1 draft has now been implemented.

Disclaimer: This script is not officially supported by VMware, please test this in a development environment before using on production systems.  

Here is a sample output for the Security Hardening Report for a subset of my vSphere 5.1 home lab environment using "profile1" check:
vmwarevSphereSecurityHardeningReport-SAMPLE.html

For more details about the security hardening script, please refer to the documentation here.

If you have any feedback/questions on the vSphere Security Hardening Guide itself, make sure you to leave your comments and questions here. If you have any feedback/questions regarding the script, please join the vSphere Security Hardening Report VMTN Group for further discussions.

How To Compile Google Authenticator for ESXi

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In my previous article I demonstrated how to use Google Authenticator to provide two-factor authentication for ESXi using the custom VIB that I had built. In this article, I will show you how to compile Google Authenticator to run on ESXi as well as an additional customizations that can be made to the source code to support multiple users.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk

Prerequisite:

  • Download and install 32-bit Linux distribution. In my lab, I used latest CentOS 6.2
  • Install pam-devel package (CentOS) or libpam0g-dev package (Ubuntu). You can reference this blog here for more details on installation
  • Ensure you have both gcc and make installed

Step 1 - Download Google Authenticator source code by running the following command:

wget http://google-authenticator.googlecode.com/files/libpam-google-authenticator-1.0-source.tar.bz2

Step 2 - Extract the source code by running the following command and change into the libpam-google-authenticator-1.0 directory:

tar -jxf libpam-google-authenticator-1.0-source.tar.bz2
cd libpam-google-authenticator-1.0

Step 3 - Edit pam_google_authenticator.c and towards the top of the file comment out the following three lines which should look like this:

//#include <sys/fsuid.h>
//#define HAS_SETFSUID
//#endif

Step 4 - By default the SECRET file is stored in /.google-authenticator and we can change the path by modifying both google-authenticator.c and pam_google_authenticator.c by editing the SECRET macro file which should look like the following:

#define SECRET      "/etc/vmware/.google_authenticator"

Google Authenticator supports multiple users by default and you can also provide this support in ESXi by leveraging the $USER OS environmental variable within the SECRET file location. This would allow each user to generate and store their own SECRET file. To do so, set the path to /etc/vmware/$USER/.google-authenticator and the username will automatically be populated when configuring Google Authenticator for each user.

Note: If you are going to create a custom VIB and would like to support multiple users, you will need to know the usernames in advance so you can create the dummy .google-authenticator file for each user. This is required so the files will automatically persist after setting up Google Authenticator.

Step 5 - Save the changes and then type "make" which will then compile the source code and produce google-authenticator binary and PAM module pam_google_authenticator.so in the same directory.

Step 6 - If you decided to create your own custom VIB, ensure you include an empty secret file so when you go and configure it, the changes will be saved. If you do not wish to lower the acceptance level of your ESXi host for the custom VIB, an alternative trick is to store the google-authenticator binary and PAM module in a local datastore as well as the secret file and copy them over using either /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh for ESXi 5.1 or /etc/rc.local for ESXi 5.0. Here is a sample of what that should look like:

Thank You For Your Vote & Support!

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The results for the Top 25 Virtualization Blogs was just posted a few days ago by Eric Siebert of vSphere-Land.com and I am very proud and honored to announce that virtuallyGhetto has moved up from last year's #8 spot to the #6 spot on the list! I am also very honored that virtuallyGhetto was also voted as the #1 scripting blog! This was quite a surprise to me especially when you are up against guys like Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank Eric for all of the time and effort he has put into setting up the site and tallying up all the votes, this is not an easy task. I would also like to thank all of my readers for voting and for your continued support. Finally, I would like to congratulate all the bloggers and give a special shout out to some of the new guys who made the top 25 this year like Michael Webster, Chris Wahl and of course the Storage Guru himself and my good colleague Cormac Hogan! Congratulations guys! I am really humbled to be part of such a talented and passionate community, there is no other like it!

I do not want to spoil the results, so be sure to watch the special vChat results episode and visits Eric's site for the full list.