Summary
CIL for SELinux is a powerful, lower-level syntax and language that is used to express all possible SELinux policy code. The SELinux userspace utilities will automatically convert existing policies into CIL code, but through this conversion, a lot of CIL constructs are not used: the conversion only uses a smaller set of CIL capabilities to establish a valid translation.
The more advanced CIL capabilities, such as namespace support, macros, and the permission sets through the classpermissionset statement, are useful when developing our own, CIL-based SELinux policies. In this chapter, we've learned how to use CIL to build complete application policies. Because there is no reference policy-like framework to simplify development, we had to write all of the necessary code constructs ourselves.
While this means that developing CIL-based policies is more resource intensive, we did also see that CIL has a few benefits that reference policy-style development cannot deal...