Book Image

SELinux System Administration, Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux System Administration, Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

Linux is a dominant player in many organizations and in the cloud. Securing the Linux environment is extremely important for any organization, and Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) acts as an additional layer to Linux system security. SELinux System Administration covers basic SELinux concepts and shows you how to enhance Linux system protection measures. You will get to grips with SELinux and understand how it is integrated. As you progress, you’ll get hands-on experience of tuning and configuring SELinux and integrating it into day-to-day administration tasks such as user management, network management, and application maintenance. Platforms such as Kubernetes, system services like systemd, and virtualization solutions like libvirt and Xen, all of which offer SELinux-specific controls, will be explained effectively so that you understand how to apply and configure SELinux within these applications. If applications do not exert the expected behavior, you’ll learn how to fine-tune policies to securely host these applications. In case no policies exist, the book will guide you through developing custom policies on your own. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to harden any Linux system using SELinux to suit your needs and fine-tune existing policies and develop custom ones to protect any app and service running on your Linux systems.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Using SELinux
8
Section 2: SELinux-Aware Platforms
14
Section 3: Policy Management

Analyzing information flow

Another analytical investigation that can be carried out on SELinux policies is information flow analysis. Unlike domain transitions, which look at how one domain can gain a certain set of permissions through transitions to another domain, information flow analysis looks at how a domain could leak (purposefully or not) information to another domain.

Information flow analysis is performed by looking at all operations that occur between two types. A source type can be read by a domain, which subsequently can write information to another type that can then be accessed by another domain. While this can still be analyzed in a step-wise fashion, it quickly becomes very challenging because we cannot limit ourselves to the read and write operations.

Information can be leaked through filenames, file descriptors, and more. Information flow analysis must take all these methods into account.

Using apol for information flow analysis

After loading an SELinux...