xmj's notes

Turning FreeBSD to HardenedBSD

In this tutorial I show you how to turn FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE into HardenedBSD’s 11-STABLE build that ships with LibreSSL.

Ingredients:

Preparation

Make sure you are running a supported FreeBSD version. Otherwise, bad things will happen. Now is also the time to do backups (and by this I mean not just a recursive zfs snapshot but actual backups).

In a first step, we will install unbound and ca_root_nss. The former, because the current maintainer of base unbound is not willing to provide an easy way of doing DNSSEC validation without additional steps; the latter, because it eliminates HTTPS verification errors with fetch(1) later in this tutorial.

    # pkg install unbound ca_root_nss

In a next step, we download the latest hbsd-update shellscript from HardenedBSD’s git repository, the corresponding config file, and certificates. Once fetched into a temporary folder, we modify the hbsd-update script to take into account the ports unbound install, and move the files into their final destination.

    % cd /tmp
    % fetch https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HardenedBSD/hardenedBSD/hardened/11-stable/master-libressl/{usr.sbin/hbsd-update/hbsd-update,etc/hbsd-update.conf,share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted/ca.hardenedbsd.org,share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted/dnssec.key-2016-07-30}
    % sed -i -e '/^UNBOUND_HOST=/ s/\/usr\/sbin\/unbound-host/\/usr\/local\/sbin\/unbound-host/' hbsd-update
    % chmod +x hbsd-update

    % sudo -i

    # mv hbsd-update /usr/sbin
    # mv hbsd-update.conf /etc
    # mkdir -p /usr/share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted
    # mv ca.hardenedbsd.org /usr/share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted
    # mv dnssec.key-2016-07-30 /usr/share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted
    # ln -s /usr/share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted/ca.hardenedbsd.org /usr/share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted/5905e1b4.0
    # ln -s /usr/share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted/dnssec.key-2016-07-30 /usr/share/keys/hbsd-update/trusted/dnssec.key

Now with the preparation out of the way, we can get to the meat:

Deploying HardenedBSD

You may have already guessed: we will use hbsd-update to turn FreeBSD into HardenedBSD and reboot once that’s done.

    # hbsd-update && reboot

NB: If you’ve checked out the FreeBSD source code to /usr/src, append the -s flag to have hbsd-update extract the HardenedBSD sources in-place. Do make sure to remove corresponding vcs directories like .svn or .git.

    # rm -rf /usr/src/{.svn,.git,*}
    # hbsd-update -s && reboot

Finally, you’ll notice that many of your installed third-party tools are now perfectly unusable, having been compiled for OpenSSL while we’re using LibreSSL. You’ll start fixing this by reinstalling pkg, and upgrading every installed package.

    # pkg-static install pkg
    # pkg upgrade -f

You’ll also find that this leads to the caveat that all the packages you have installed from ports are now missing shared libraries, and need to be reinstalled.

If you’ve installed any of those third-party tools from ports, you will want to reinstall them using the HardenedBSD ports tree.

To make full use of HardenedBSD’s security features, install secadm and secadm-kmod, and take a look at secadm-rules the HBSD project provides:

    % git clone https://github.com/hardenedbsd/hardenedbsd-ports ports
    % make -C ports/hardenedbsd/secadm config install clean
    % make -C ports/hardenedbsd/secadm-kmod config install clean
    % git clone https://github.com/HardenedBSD/secadm-rules

At this point, I’d like to point out to the HardenedBSD Handbook chapter on secadm, and call it a day.