Lynis 3.1 releases: Open source auditing in Linux system

by do son · Published June 24, 2019 · Updated November 4, 2024

Lynis is an open-source security auditing tool. Used by system administrators, security professionals, and auditors, to evaluate the security defenses of their Linux and UNIX-based systems. It runs on the host itself, so it performs more extensive security scans than vulnerability scanners. It is also the client in our Lynis Enterprise offering.

Supported operating systems

Lynis runs on almost all UNIX-based systems and versions, including:

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
MacOS
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
and others

It even runs on systems like the Raspberry Pi or QNAP storage devices.

Installation optional

Lynis is light-weight and easy to use. Installation is optional: just copy it to a system, and use “./lynis audit system” to start the security scan. It is written in shell script and released as open source software (GPL). Software packages are available from our software repository.

How it works

performs hundreds of individual tests. Each helps to determine the security state of the system. This is what happens during a scan with Lynis:

Steps

Determine the operating system
Search for available tools and utilities
Check for Lynis update
Run tests with enabled plugins
Run security tests per category
Report the status of security scan

Besides the data displayed on the screen, all technical details about the scan are stored in a log file. Any findings (warnings, suggestions, data collection) are stored in a report file.

Changelog Lynis v3.1

Added

Translation: Indonesian

Changed

MALW-3280 – Correction to detect com.avast.daemon
OS detection added for Guix System, macOS Ventura (13.x)/Sonoma (14.x), NXP LSDK, OpenEmbedded “nodistro”, and The Yocto Projects distro “Poky”
Updated Amazon Linux EOL dates and addition of Amazon Linux 2023
STATUS_NOT_ACTIVE variable added to translation files
End-of-life dates updated
Fixing missing or erroneous test number comments
Detection of SentinelOne corrected
Wazuh for file integrity and tooling
Updated parsing output of arch-audit
Added support for SentinelOne detection
Replacing deprecated option -i for xargs
Path detection for PostgreSQL improved