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

Introducing PostgreSQL and sepgsql

PostgreSQL is a popular, featureful, and mature relational database management system. Like Apache, it also enables a modular extension of its functionalities through loadable modules. The module we will investigate is called sepgsql, shorthand for Security Enhanced PostgreSQL or SEPostgreSQL. Through sepgsql, PostgreSQL enhances itself with SELinux support for additional access controls, offering fine-grained data flow controls based on SELinux policy rules.

Please be aware though that sepgsql does not implement a full mandatory access control system within PostgreSQL, as not all PostgreSQL statements will result in a policy check. While it augments the security posture of the PostgreSQL database, the module has a few limitations listed in its online documentation, available at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/sepgsql.html (adjust the version number in the URL as needed; the referenced document at this URL is for PostgreSQL 10, which is the...