Book Image

SELinux Cookbook

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux Cookbook

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
SELinux Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using cron with SELinux


Another example of an SELinux-aware application is cron. Well, actually a set of cron implementations, as there is not a single cron application. Examples of cron implementations are vixie-cron, cronie, and fcron.

The cron implementations invoke commands for (and as) a particular Linux user. As these commands are not set in stone (the main purpose of cron is to allow any command to be run for a particular user or even for the system itself), it is not possible to easily create a policy that is sufficiently fine-grained to accommodate all features provided by cron. After all, for SELinux itself, there is no difference between cron calling a command for one user or another: all that is involved is the cron domain (crond_t) and the target type of the command (such as bin_t).

For this reason, many cron implementations are made SELinux-aware, allowing the cron implementation to select the proper target context.

How to do it…

To properly interact with an SELinux-aware cron...