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

Chapter 3. Managing User Logins

When we log in to a SELinux-enabled system, we are assigned a default context to work in. This context contains a SELinux user, a SELinux role, a domain, and optionally, a sensitivity range.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Define users that have sufficient rights to do their jobs, ranging from regular users with strict SELinux protections to fully privileged, administrative users with few SELinux protections

  • Create and assign categories and sensitivities

  • Assign roles to users and use various tools to switch roles

We will end the chapter by learning how SELinux integrates with the Linux authentication process.