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Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (or RHEL 9) on May 18, 2022; before that, RHEL 9 was announced only a few weeks ago at the Red Hat Summit. RHEL 9 is designed to drive enterprise transformation for evolving market forces and customer demands in an automated and distributed IT world.
Probably one of the biggest highlights from the RHEL 9 release is the improvement made to security. RHEL 9 includes features that help address hardware-level security vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown. The platform will also help meet customer security requirements, supporting compliance regulations such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA.
RHEL 9 Security and Compliance Capabilities include:
- Smart Card authentication via web console: Users can make use of smart card authentication to access remote hosts through the RHEL web console (sudo, SSH, etc.).
- Additional security profiles: Intelligence gathering and remediation services such as Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite will allow customers access to powerful tools to rapidly resolve compliance issues at scale, while achieving compliance with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and more.
- Detailed SSSD logging: SSSD, the built-in enterprise single-sign-on framework now added more details for event logging such as time to complete tasks, errors, etc. New search capabilities also provide admins analytical ability when it comes to performance and configuration issues.
- Integrated OpenSSL 3: It supports the new OpenSSL 3 cryptographic frameworks. Built-in RHEL utilities have been recompiled to leverage OpenSSL 3.
- Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) digital hashes and signatures: Dynamically verify the integrity of the OS to detect rogue modifications across your infrastructure.
- SSH root password login disabled by default: RHEL 9 will disallow users to log in as `root` with a password. This helps to prevent brute force attacks gaining access via passwords.
Given the depth of these enhancements, it might require more time and effort for IT admins to test and prepare for the upgrade. To ensure admins are not delayed, JumpCloud provides same-day support for RHEL 9 upon its release. That means, as of today, JumpCloud administrators will be able to secure, manage and view their RHEL 9 systems directly from the JumpCloud Directory Platform.
JumpCloud’s same-day support for RHEL 9 enables administrators not only to identify and understand the impact of the new capabilities but allow organizations to test and perform timely preparation before upgrading to the new platform.
At JumpCloud, we also make it easy for you to manage your Ubuntu servers, Red Hat clients, or Windows fleet. If you want to centralize your management and control, try JumpCloud Free today for up to 10 users and 10 devices for as long as you need until you scale to more.
