Book Image

SELinux System Administration

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux System Administration

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

NSA Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a set of patches and added utilities to the Linux kernel to incorporate a strong, flexible, mandatory access control architecture into the major subsystems of the kernel. With its fine-grained yet flexible approach, it is no wonder Linux distributions are firing up SELinux as a default security measure. SELinux System Administration covers the majority of SELinux features through a mix of real-life scenarios, descriptions, and examples. Everything an administrator needs to further tune SELinux to suit their needs are present in this book. This book touches on various SELinux topics, guiding you through the configuration of SELinux contexts, definitions, and the assignment of SELinux roles, and finishes up with policy enhancements. All of SELinux's configuration handles, be they conditional policies, constraints, policy types, or audit capabilities, are covered in this book with genuine examples that administrators might come across. By the end, SELinux System Administration will have taught you how to configure your Linux system to be more secure, powered by a formidable mandatory access control.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we saw how file contexts are stored as extended attributes on the filesystem and where SELinux keeps its definition on what contexts are to be assigned on which files. We also learned to work with the semanage tool to manipulate this information.

On the process level, we got our first taste of SELinux policies, identifying when a process is launched inside a certain SELinux domain. With it, we touched the sesearch and seinfo applications to query the SELinux policy.

In the next chapter, we will expand our knowledge of protecting the operating system from a regular file, and process protection measures towards the networking-related features of SELinux.