Tips for Securing a LAMP Server

Question

This is a Canonical Question about Securing a LAMP stack

What are the absolute guidelines for securing a LAMP server?

Answer 1

David's answer is a good baseline of the general principles of server hardening. As David indicated, this is a huge question. The specific techniques you take could depend highly on your environment and how your server will be used. Warning, this can take a lot of work in a test environment to build out and get done right. Followed by a lot of work to integrate into your production environment, and more importantly, business process.

First, however, check to see if your organization has any hardening policies, as those might be the most directly relevant. If not, depending on your role, this might be a great time to build them out. I would also recommend tackling each component separately from the bottom up.

The L
There are lots of good guides available to help you out. This list may or may not help you depending on your distribution.

• Center for Internet Security Benchmarks - Distribution specific for the major flavors
• CentOS Hardening HowTo - Follows closely to the CIS RHEL5 guide, but is a much easier read
• NIST SP800-123 - Guide to General Server Security
• NSA Hardening Factsheets - Not as recently updated as CIS, but still mostly applicable
• Tiger - Live System Security Auditing Software

The A
Apache can be fun to secure. I find it easier to harden the OS and maintain usability than either Apache or PHP.

• Apache Server Hardening - This question on the IT Security sister site has lots of good information.
• Center for Internet Security Benchmarks - Again, Apache benchmarks.
• Apache Security Tips - Straight from the Apache project, it looks like it covers the basics
• DISA Hardening Checklist - Checklist from the DoD Information Assurance guys

The M

• Center for Internet Security Benchmarks - Again, but for MySQL benchmarks
• OWASP MySQL Hardening
• General Security Guidelines - Basic checklist from the project devs

The P
This runs headlong into the whole idea of Secure Programming Practices, which is an entire discipline of its own. SANS and OWASP have a ridiculous amount of information on the subject, so I won't try to replicate it here. I will focus on the runtime configuration and let your developers worry about the rest. Sometimes the 'P' in LAMP refers to Perl, but usually PHP. I am assuming the latter.

• Hardening PHP - Some minor discussion, also on IT Security SE site.
• Hardened PHP Project - Main project that produces Suhosin, an attempt to patch the PHP application to project against certain types of attacks.
• Hardening PHP With Suhosin - A brief HowTo specifically for Suhosin
• Hardening PHP from php.ini - Short, but not bad discussion on some of the security related runtime options

Answer 2

You've asked a question that is, quite frankly, worthy of a few books on the topic. But there are some general basic guidelines that work well:

1. Keep Updated. This means the OS, all services, and ESPECIALLY all webapps you're running.
2. Disable any unneeded services, limit those that are needed to the minimum exposure (if you're not remotely connecting to MySQL, then don't have it listening on TCP), and run a host-based firewall. (If it's strictly LAMP, you should be good with 80 and 443, but maybe SSH as well for administration.))
3. Use strong passwords. Better yet, if you use SSH, use only key-based auth.
4. Make sure you're not logging in as root. Log in as users and use su & sudo.
5. While it doesn't make things more secure, you should run tools like logwatch so you're aware of what's happening on your server.

Hope that helps you get started.