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

libvirt SELinux support


The libvirt project offers a virtualization abstraction layer, through which administrators can manage virtual machines without direct knowledge of or expertise in the underlying virtualization platform. As such, administrators can use the libvirt-offered tools to manage virtual machines running on QEMU, QEMU/KVM, Xen, and so forth.

To use the sVirt approach, libvirt can be built with SELinux support. When this is the case and the guests are marked as being governed (security-wise) through SELinux, then the sVirt domains and types are used/enforced by libvirt. The libvirt code will also perform the category selection to enforce guest isolation and will ensure that the image files are assigned the right label (image files that are in use should get a different label than inactive image files).

Thanks to the sVirt implementation, Red Hat was able to obtain a Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (CC EAL 4+) certification (a measure of security trustworthiness...