Michael Young has enjoyed working in the technology space for 25+ years. He works for CIQ as a Principal Systems Engineer on the Release All the Things team where he contributes his experience as a systems administrator, RPM packager, IT and all around support of Linux based operating systems.  He has contributed over the years to different open source projects as a community developer and packager. Michael is a member of the Rocky Linux Software Foundation (RESF) and Rocky Linux project. He is a member of the Release Engineering Team.

Michael loves to read, investigate, learn anything that has to do with technology that can be used for improving operations and infrastructure.

Presentations

23x

Secure Boot: Getting to know your frenemy

Secure boot has been around for many years now, having been introduced into the UEFI spec in 2006.  It is one of those things that tends to be turned off when installing Linux. There are different opinions around secure boot and whether it solves a problem or not. It is becoming more common for environments to require keeping secure boot turned on. Secure boot is not going away in the near future. It is now being used in the cloud. We need to get to know our frenemy.

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23x

Sponsored Workshop: Hardening Rocky Linux the Hard Way — and the Easy Way with RLC-H

Hardening a Linux system is straightforward in concept and surprisingly complex in practice. Most teams rely on Ansible playbooks, custom scripts, and manual STIG checklists that are difficult to maintain, hard to audit, and prone to drift over time.

This workshop takes a practical, side-by-side look at Linux hardening: we start with a fresh Rocky Linux install and walk through the manual hardening process — SSH configuration, kernel tuning, password policy, SELinux, and compliance frameworks like DISA-STIG and CIS. We then explore what Rocky Linux from CIQ — Hardened (RLC-H) delivers out of the box: kernel runtime guards, hardened memory allocation, pre-remediated compliance images, Secure Boot, and commercially backed CVE remediation — by design, not by configuration.

This is not a lecture. Attendees of all experience levels are welcome, and those with deep security backgrounds are especially encouraged to bring their perspective. The goal is an honest conversation about where the traditional DIY approach holds up, where it falls short, and what a purpose-built hardened distribution changes.

No CIQ Portal access required. All hands-on exercises use community Rocky Linux.

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