One of the most common methods of deploying secure hosts is with imaging. An image is a snapshot of a single system that administrators deploy to multiple other systems and imaging has become an important security practice for many organizations.
Note: This blog is an excerpt from the
CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-301 Study Guide.
Understanding the Imaging Process
The following figure and text identify the overall process of capturing and deploying an image.
- Administrators start with a blank source system. They install and configure the operating system, install and configure any desired applications, and modify security settings. They perform extensive testing to ensure the system works as desired and that it is secure.
- Next, administrators capture the image. Symantec’s Ghost is a popular imaging application, and Windows Server 2008 includes free tools many organizations use to capture and deploy images. The captured image is simply a file that can be stored on a server or copied to external media, such as a DVD or external USB drive.
- In step 3, administrators deploy the image to multiple systems. The image installs the same configuration on the target systems as the original source system.
Administrators will often take a significant amount of time to configure and test the source system. They follow the same hardening practices discussed earlier and often use security and configuration baselines. If they’re deploying the image to just a few systems, they may create the image in just a few hours. However, if they’re deploying it to thousands of systems, they may take weeks or months to create and test the image. Once the image is created, image deployment is very quick and requires little administrative effort.
Imaging provides two important benefits.
- Secure starting point. The image includes mandated security configurations for the system. Personnel who deploy the system don’t need to remember or follow extensive checklists to ensure that new systems are set up with all the detailed configuration and security settings. The deployed image retains all the settings of the original image. Administrators will still configure some settings, such as the computer name, after deploying the image.
- Reduced costs. Deploying imaged systems reduces the overall maintenance costs and improves reliability. Support personnel don’t need to learn multiple different end-user system environments to assist end users. Instead, they learn just one. When troubleshooting, support personnel spend their time focused on helping the end user rather than trying to learn the system configuration. Managers understand this as reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) for systems.
Many virtualization tools include the ability to convert an image to a virtual system. In other words, once you create the image, you can deploy it to either a physical system or a virtual system. From a security perspective, there is no difference how you deploy it. If you’ve locked down the image for deployment to a physical system, you’ve locked it down for deployment to a virtual system.
Remember this
Standardized images include mandatory security configurations. This ensures the system starts in a secure state and reduces overall costs. There is no difference in the security requirements for images deployed to physical computers, or as virtual systems.
Imaging isn’t limited to only desktop computers. You can image any system, including servers. For example, consider an organization that maintains fifty database servers in a large datacenter. The organization can use imaging to deploy new servers or as part of its disaster recovery plan to restore failed servers. It is much quicker to deploy an image to rebuild a failed server than it is to rebuild a server from scratch. As long as the images are kept up to date, this also helps ensure the recovered server starts in a secure state.
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U.S. Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB)
The U.S. government has been using standard images for many years. This started as a Standard Desktop Core Configuration (SDCC) with the U.S. Air Force and morphed into the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) mandated by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for all federal agencies. The current version is the USGCB, which is also mandated by OMB.
Before using these images, many agencies were repeating common security errors. Smaller agencies without extensive IT or security experience deployed systems without locking them down. Even when government security professionals knew about common attacks and how to protect systems, the smaller agencies didn’t have the expertise or manpower to implement the fixes.
However, agencies are now consistently deploying new systems in a secure state. The images include the mandated security settings and do not require extensive security knowledge or expertise to deploy. Of course, this isn’t the only security measure the agencies take, but it does provide a good start.
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