All about making systems more resilient against attacks
Hardening is the process of making a system more resilient in malicious environments. There are basically three hardening strategies:
- Reduce the attack surface. For instance, deactivate unnecessary services, remove unnecessary accounts and software, and revoke unnecessary privileges.
- Strengthen the defences. For instance, data execution prevention, address space layout randomization, packet and content filtering as well as rigid access controls can make attacks much harder to mount.
- Segregation and containment. For instance, sandboxes, containers, and virtualization can help to reduce the attack impact.
Use this tag of your question is primarily concerned about actions and measures that make a system or an application significantly more secure than average. If you tag your question with hardening, then avoid the use of security unless your question is about the security of a particular hardening mechanism.
