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

Summary


In this chapter, we saw how to enable and disable SELinux both on a complete system level as well as a per-service level using various methods: kernel boot options, SELinux configuration file, or plain commands. One of the commands is semanage permissive, which can disable SELinux protections for a single service.

Next, we saw where SELinux logs its events and how to interpret them, which is one of the most important capabilities of an administrator dealing with SELinux. To assist us with this interpretation, there are tools such as setroubleshoot, sealert, and audit2why. We also dived into several utilities related to Linux auditing to help us sift through various events.

In the next chapter, we will look at the first administrative task on SELinux systems: managing user accounts, their associated SELinux roles, and security clearances for the resources on the system.