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

Using mod_selinux with Apache

Applications are often web-based, exposing their interface as either a common website or a simple web service, and executing the bulk of logic either within the web server or in backend services that the web server interacts with for the user.

A web-based application has the huge advantage that end users often don't require any application or client to be installed on top of what is available by default on their device, be it a workstation, laptop, mobile, wristwatch, or smart TV.

However, unlike the services discussed earlier, Apache does not run individual user sessions through PAM logins on the system. Instead, user requests are handled by the web server threads and processes themselves, which makes easy SELinux-based controls a bit harder to accomplish.

Introducing mod_selinux

Apache has support for modules: dynamically loadable code that enhances the functionality of the web server, without having to rebuild the web server code itself...