Book Image

SELinux System Administration, Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux System Administration, Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

Linux is a dominant player in many organizations and in the cloud. Securing the Linux environment is extremely important for any organization, and Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) acts as an additional layer to Linux system security. SELinux System Administration covers basic SELinux concepts and shows you how to enhance Linux system protection measures. You will get to grips with SELinux and understand how it is integrated. As you progress, you’ll get hands-on experience of tuning and configuring SELinux and integrating it into day-to-day administration tasks such as user management, network management, and application maintenance. Platforms such as Kubernetes, system services like systemd, and virtualization solutions like libvirt and Xen, all of which offer SELinux-specific controls, will be explained effectively so that you understand how to apply and configure SELinux within these applications. If applications do not exert the expected behavior, you’ll learn how to fine-tune policies to securely host these applications. In case no policies exist, the book will guide you through developing custom policies on your own. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to harden any Linux system using SELinux to suit your needs and fine-tune existing policies and develop custom ones to protect any app and service running on your Linux systems.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Using SELinux
8
Section 2: SELinux-Aware Platforms
14
Section 3: Policy Management

Chapter 8: SEPostgreSQL – Extending PostgreSQL with SELinux

In the previous chapter, we covered a few example SELinux-aware applications: applications that know and interact with the SELinux subsystem to further enhance security within the application context. Some of these use existing policy constructs, such as Apache's mod_selinux, whereas others enhance the policy with custom classes to further fine-tune their behavior (as with D-Bus and the acquire_svc permission).

With Security-Enhanced PostgreSQL (SEPostgreSQL), we get a more elaborate example of an SELinux-aware application, which uses multiple additional classes within SELinux, as well as labeling its internal database objects to further enforce security rules. In this chapter, we will learn how to apply labels within PostgreSQL, debug its enforcement rules, associate the right labels with the PostgreSQL resources, and show how this label-based security method can be used to augment specific security practices...