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

Logging with systemd


As mentioned before, systemd is not only responsible for service management: it takes up several other tasks as well. One of these tasks is log management, which is traditionally implemented through a system logger.

While systemd still supports running with a traditional system logger, it now suggests the use of systemd-journald. One of the advantages of the journal daemon is that it is not limited to textual, single-line log messages. Daemons can now use binaries as well as multiline messages as part of its logging capabilities.

The journal daemon also registers information about the sending process alongside the log messages itself. This additional information contains ownership data (process owner) including the SELinux context of the sending process.

Retrieving SELinux-related information

The traditional approach to receive SELinux-related information (excluding the audit events we tackled before) is to grep through the log information. With the journal daemon, this...