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

Understanding SELinux-secured virtualization

Virtualization is a core concept that plays a part in many infrastructural service designs. Ever since its inception in the early 1970s as a means of isolating workloads and abstracting hardware dependencies, virtualization implementations have grown tremendously. When we look at infrastructure service offerings today, we quickly realize that many cloud providers would be out of service if they could not rely on the benefits and virtues of virtualization.

One of the properties that virtualization offers is isolation, which SELinux can support and augment quite nicely.

Introducing virtualization

When we look at virtualization, we look at the abstraction layers it provides to hide certain resource views (such as hardware or processing power). Virtualization contributes to the development of more efficient hardware usage (which results in better cost control), centralized views on resources and systems, more flexibility in the number...