CentOS 7 hardening for plesk 12.5

[Oto Tortorella]

Hello there,

I'm using CentOS 7, minimal install, and trying to harden it for the very first time.
I'm insicure on what resources Plesk 12.5 needs.

Among the others I have theese two service enabled:
polkit.service
dbus.service

Anyone can tell me if theese are needed by plesk or I can safely disable and mask them?

Thanks
Oto Tortorella
TeleType

 

[Bitpalast]

I think it is called "minimal install", because it is the minimum you will need for trouble-free operations. Plesk adds several things to it, but only what Plesk needs.

 

[Oto Tortorella]

Thank you Peter, I remove a lot of things from the minimal install of CentOS 5/6, less in CentOS 7. There is something still unuseful for Plesk but it seems more "Minimal" then the previous versions.

I found that the polkit.service and the dbus.service are not demons but services that will be called when needed, so they can stay there without wasting resources.
From a security point of wiew and in order to reduce the attackable surface, you should remove them but polkit is a dependency of The NetworkManager and dbus is used by systemd.
If you want to remove polkit, you can, but you should change the way network is managed in CentOS 7, feasible but better stay into the standards.
D-bus is now a requirement for the base system, you cannot remove it. I was used to remove it in CentOS 5/6, but now you cannot.

Hope this can be useful.

Thank you
Oto tortorella