

KITTEN-0.2
----------

Welcome to kitten, a primitve Linux installation security checker.  It's
not as versatile as other checkers such as the tiger scripts; that's why
I called it kitten:-)

It's main objectives are:

 *	Identify possible installation problems. Repeatedly in the past,
	there have been Linux distributions with bad file ownership,
	permissions etc. This tool should aid you in finding some of
	these.

 *	Finding potential security problems such as unusual entries
	in .rhosts files, unwanted setuid binaries, etc.

 *	Provide a framework for some consistency checking.

 *	Automated generation of a configuration file for tripwire.


How does it work?
-----------------
Kitten is a collection of perl4 scripts and libraries. The main program
is kitten.pl, which runs the tests present in the checks subdirectory.
These checks are usually little more than front-ends to the functions
contained in the libraries (in klib).

The libraries implemented in this version are:

 chkperm	General permission checker. This is driven by a database
		file called `hostname`.kitten. The distribution contains
		a sample database for my machine, monad. The syntax is
		pretty straight- forward, although it may not always be
		easy to understand what each rule does. When I find the
		time, I'll write up a small tutorial that explains their
		semantics. For the time being, you have to refer to the
		perl source code if you want to find out how it works.

		The sample database should be fairly general. It includes
		checks for most packages I have installed on my machine,
		but there are a number of packages it does not cover
		(e.g. c News). If you add more packages, or modify 
		existing entries to reflect a different setup on a
		standard Linux distribution, I'd be interested to receive
		a copy from you.

 chkhome	does various checks on a user's home directories.

 chkrhosts	Checks a user's .rhosts or the system-wide hosts.equiv
		file for bad permissions and non-local entries in them.

 chksuid	performs a recursive search over the entire file system for
		suid binaries that have not been found during the previous
		scan in chkperms.


In addition to these checks, kitten produces a database file suitable for
tripwire of all the files it finds during the chkperms scan. 

How to contribute
-----------------
If you want to contribute to kitten, please send me mail at
okir@monad.swb.de. Some parts of the code may need a cleanup; the sample
database may also need a few updates.

Copyright
---------
Kitten is copyright (C) 1995 Olaf Kirch. It may be distributed freely under
the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Have fun
Olaf Kirch
