Lightweight, Agentless Host Auditing and Security Hardening for Distributed Linux Infrastructure: An Automated Bash Framework

The proliferation of distributed cloud nodes, containers, and minimal virtual private servers (VPS) has significantly expanded the attack surface of modern Linux infrastructure. Misconfigurations in critical network services, unpatched software packages, and the persistence of legacy plaintext protocols remain primary vectors for initial system compromise. While commercial security and compliance auditing platforms exist, they frequently introduce non-trivial overhead, require extensive third-party dependency chains, or mandate long-running privileged background agents that are impractical for resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we present an automated, lightweight, and agentless host auditing framework implemented purely in native Bash. The proposed system features an abstraction layer supporting multi-distribution package management (covering Debian, RHEL, and Arch ecosystems), continuous runtime performance telemetry, and deterministic security posture inspection targeting SSH configurations, open services, and obsolete daemon detection. The tool outputs structured machine-readable JSON assessments alongside administrative plain-text summaries without requiring external execution runtimes. Experimental validation demonstrates rapid execution times with negligible CPU and memory overhead, establishing an efficient baseline audit mechanism for automated deployment pipelines and production Linux environments. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Deffult/linux-sys-audit