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

Chapter 6

  1. Ansible (using setype within the file module) and Puppet (using seltype in its file module) are the only two tools that have native support for explicitly setting SELinux contexts on resources. However, Chef will automatically relabel resources according to the defined file context rules, but you cannot natively override this behavior.
  2. Except for SaltStack, all orchestration tools have support for community-built and community-supported modules that extend native support of the tools. Ansible's Galaxy, Puppet's Forge, and Chef's Supermarket are the main communities for these customizations.

    All orchestration tools (including SaltStack) are flexible enough to use commands and simple checks to check state and make changes, effectively allowing administrators to customize the definitions to their liking.

  3. All tools have their own view and design on how they approach things. Ansible, for instance, pushes its changes to the remote nodes, whereas the others...