NetBackup and Veritas Appliances Hardening Guide
- Top recommendations to improve your NetBackup and Veritas appliances security posture
- Introduction
- Keeping all systems and software updated
- Enabling multifactor authentication
- Increasing the appliance security level
- Implementing an immutable data vault
- Securing credentials
- Reducing network exposure
- Enabling encryption
- Enabling catalog protection
- Enabling malware scanning and anomaly detection
- Enabling security observability
- Restricting user access
- Configuring a sign-in banner
- Steps to protect Flex Appliance
- About Flex Appliance hardening
- Managing single sign-on (SSO)
- Managing user authentication with smart cards or digital certificates
- About lockdown mode
- Using network access control
- Using an external certificate
- Forwarding logs
- Creating a NetBackup WORM storage server instance
- Configuring an isolated recovery environment on a WORM storage server
- Protecting the NetBackup catalog on a WORM storage server
- Using a sign-in banner
- Steps to protect NetBackup Appliance
- About NetBackup Appliance hardening
- About single sign-on (SSO) authentication and authorization
- About authentication using smart cards and digital certificates
- Disable user access to the NetBackup appliance operating system
- About Network Access Control
- About data encryption
- FIPS 140-2 conformance for NetBackup Appliance
- About implementing external certificates
- About forwarding logs to an external server
- Creating the appliance login banner
- Steps to protect NetBackup
- About NetBackup hardening
- Configure NetBackup for single sign-on (SSO)
- Configure user authentication with smart cards or digital certificates
- Access codes
- Workflow to configure immutable and indelible data
- Add a configuration for an external CMS server
- Configuring an isolated recovery environment on a NetBackup BYO media server
- About FIPS support in NetBackup
- Installing KMS
- Workflow for external KMS configuration
- Validating KMS credentials
- Configuring KMS credentials
- Configuring KMS
- Creating keys in an external KMS
- Workflow to configure data-in-transit encryption
- Workflow to use external certificates for NetBackup host communication
- About certificate revocation lists for external CA
- Configuring an external certificate for the NetBackup web server
- Configuring the primary server to use an external CA-signed certificate
- Configuring an external certificate for a clustered primary server
- Configuring a NetBackup host (media server, client, or cluster node) to use an external CA-signed certificate after installation
- Configuration options for external CA-signed certificates
- ECA_CERT_PATH for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_TRUST_STORE_PATH for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_KEY_PASSPHRASEFILE for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_CRL_CHECK for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_CRL_PATH for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_CRL_PATH_SYNC_HOURS for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_CRL_REFRESH_HOURS for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_DISABLE_AUTO_ENROLLMENT for NetBackup servers and clients
- ECA_DR_BKUP_WIN_CERT_STORE for NetBackup servers and clients
- MANAGE_WIN_CERT_STORE_PRIVATE_KEY option for NetBackup primary servers
- Guidelines for managing the primary server NetBackup catalog
- About protecting the MSDP catalog
- How to set up malware scanning
- About backup anomaly detection
- Send audit events to system logs
- Send audit events to log forwarding endpoints
- Display a banner to users when they sign in
About FIPS support in NetBackup
By default, FIPS mode is disabled in NetBackup.
The following workloads are supported in FIPS-compliant mode:
Oracle, MS-SQL, SAP HANA, DB2, VMware, Hyper-V, RHV, Nutanix, DynamicNAS, MongoDB, Hadoop, HBase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MariaDB, SharePoint
Cassandra, Sybase, Informix, MS-Exchange, Enterprise Vault, BMR, Universal Shares, OpenStack (cloud-based solution)
The following operating system-level support is available in FIPS mode:
Once you enable FIPS mode on RHEL 8, the operating system requires that each RPM package has a SHA-256 digest. RPMs that do not have this digest will fail to install. The RPMs that are built using the native toolchain present on RHEL 6 or RHEL 7 platforms do not include a SHA-256 digest and therefore can fail to install on RHEL 8 when FIPS mode is enabled. This issue affects NetBackup 9.1 and earlier setups as packages for these versions are built using the OS native toolchain on RHEL 7 or earlier.
Starting with NetBackup 10.0, the packages are built using a toolchain that adds the SHA-256 digest and these can be installed on RHEL 8 with FIPS mode enabled.
The following components, configurations, or operations are not supported in FIPS mode:
Client-side encryption
Note:
To perform a backup with client-side encryption, you need to disable FIPS mode on the client host.
NDMP backups
Scripts (Perl, batch, shell, python) that are executed within NetBackup
Binaries or utilities: restore_spec_utility, nbcallhomeproxyconfig, nbbsdtar, nbrepo
NetBackup domain with NBAC enabled
If NBAC is configured in the NetBackup domain, it is recommended that you do not enable FIPS mode.
The MQBROKER processes do not support NetBackup-level FIPS configuration on Windows.
MIT Kerberos used by Hadoop and HBase does not operate with a FIPS-enabled OpenSSL. To perform backup with Kerberos authentication, you need to disable FIPS on the backup host.
NetBackup CloudPoint does not support the CloudPoint host that is configured in FIPS mode.
SharePoint internally uses encryption algorithms that do not comply with FIPS standards. The Windows FIPS policy blocks the MD5 hashing algorithms that SharePoint uses. Therefore, the OS-level FIPS policy should be disabled for the SharePoint restores for successful operation.
Note that NetBackup-FIPS is supported for protecting SharePoint.
See the following articles for more details: