Book Image

SELinux System Administration - Second Edition

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux System Administration - Second Edition

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

Do you have the crucial job of protecting your private and company systems from malicious attacks and undefined application behavior? Are you looking to secure your Linux systems with improved access controls? Look no further, intrepid administrator! This book will show you how to enhance your system’s secure state across Linux distributions, helping you keep application vulnerabilities at bay. This book covers the core SELinux concepts and shows you how to leverage SELinux to improve the protection measures of a Linux system. You will learn the SELinux fundamentals and all of SELinux’s configuration handles including conditional policies, constraints, policy types, and audit capabilities. These topics are paired with genuine examples of situations and issues you may come across as an administrator. In addition, you will learn how to further harden the virtualization offering of both libvirt (sVirt) and Docker through SELinux. By the end of the book you will know how SELinux works and how you can tune it to meet your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
SELinux System Administration - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Distinguishing between policies


The most common SELinux policy store names are strict, targeted, mcs, and mls. None of the names assigned to policy stores are fixed, though, so it is a matter of convention. Hence, it is recommended to consult the distribution documentation to verify what the proper name of the policy should be. Still, the name often provides some information about the SELinux options that are enabled through the policy.

Supporting MLS

One of the options that can be enabled is MLS support. If it is disabled, then the SELinux context will not have a fourth field with sensitivity information in it, making the contexts of processes and files look as follows:

    staff_u:sysadm_r:sysadm_t 

To check whether or not MLS is enabled, it is sufficient to see if the context, indeed, doesn't contain such a fourth field, but it can also be acquired from the Policy MLS status line in the output of sestatus:

    # sestatus | grep MLS 
    Policy MLS Status:            disabled...