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

Domain transition analysis


An important analytical approach when dealing with SELinux policies is to perform a domain transition analysis. Domains are bounded by the access controls that are in place for a given domain, but users (sessions) can transition to other domains by executing the right set of applications.

Analyzing if, and how, a transition can occur between two domains allows administrators to validate the secure state of the policy. Given the mandatory nature of SELinux, adversaries will find it difficult to be able to execute target applications if a domain transition analysis shows that the source domain cannot execute said application, either directly or indirectly.

Use domain transition analysis to confirm whether a domain is correctly confined and that vulnerabilities within a domain cannot lead to privilege escalations.

Using apol for domain transition analysis

After starting apol, to perform a domain transition analysis, select New Analysis. A number of analytical services...