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

From IPC to TCP and UDP sockets


Linux applications communicate with each other either directly or over a network. But the difference between direct communication and networked communication, from an application programmer's point of view, is not always that big. Let's look at the various communication methods that Linux supports and how SELinux aligns with them.

Using shared memory

The method that is the least network-like is the use of shared memory. Applications can share certain parts of the memory with each other and use those shared segments to communicate between two (or more) processes. To govern access to the shared memory, application programmers can use mutual exclusions (mutexes) or semaphores. A semaphore is an integer that is atomically incremented or decremented (ensuring that two applications do not overwrite each other's values without knowing about the value change), whereas a mutex can be interpreted as a special kind of semaphore that only takes the values 0 or 1.

On Linux...