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

Using Vagrant with libvirt

Vagrant is a framework to quickly spin up and manage virtual machines and is very popular within development communities. While Vagrant uses Oracle VirtualBox as the hypervisor by default, we can install a libvirt plugin to use Vagrant with libvirt, benefiting from the sVirt security offered by SELinux.

Deploying Vagrant and the libvirt plugin

The Vagrant application can be installed from a single RPM file. Find the latest version at https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html and install it. For instance, for CentOS systems, you can use yum directly:

# yum install https://releases.hashicorp.com/vagrant/2.2.9/vagrant_2.2.9_x86_64.rpm

To install the libvirt plugin, we first need to make sure that the dependencies are installed as well. The documentation, online at https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt, gives a good overview of which packages need to be installed. Do not forget this step, as dependency failures during the plugin installation...