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

SELinux logging and auditing


SELinux developers are well aware that a security-oriented subsystem such as SELinux can only succeed if it is capable of enhanced logging and even debugging. Every action that SELinux takes, as part of the LSM hooks that it implements, should be auditable. Denials (actions that SELinux prevents) should always be logged so that administrators can take due action. SELinux tuning and changes, such as loading new policies or altering SELinux booleans, should always result in an audit message being displayed.

Following audit events

By default, SELinux will send its messages to the Linux audit subsystem (assuming the Linux kernel is configured with the audit subsystem enabled through the CONFIG_AUDIT kernel configuration). There, the messages are picked up by the Linux audit daemon (auditd) and logged in the /var/log/audit/audit.log file. Additional handling rules can be defined through the audit dispatcher process (audisp), which picks up audit events and dispatches...