Locking down users’ home directories the Red Hat way

This is another area where different Linux distro families do business differently from each other. As we shall see, each distro family comes with different default security settings for users’ home directories. A security administrator who oversees a mixed environment of different Linux distros will need to take this into account.

Traditionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all of its offspring, such as CentOS and AlmaLinux, have had better out-of-the-box security than any other family of Linux distros. This makes it quicker and easier to harden Red Hat-type systems because much of the work has already been done. One thing that’s already been done for us is locking down users’ home directories:

 [donnie@localhost home]$ sudo useradd charlie
 [sudo] password for donnie:
 [donnie@localhost home]$
 [donnie@localhost home]$ ls -l
 total 0
 drwx------. 2 charlie charlie 59 Oct 1 15:25 charlie
 drwx...