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 10: Using Xen Security Modules with FLASK

In Chapter 9, Secure Virtualization, we saw that libvirt is able to apply sVirt protection measures, based upon SELinux domains and category assignation, to several supported hypervisors. Xen, another popular open source hypervisor, is also supported by libvirt, but it is much more common to use Xen on its own, independent from libvirt.

Xen itself has a security framework called Xen Security Modules (XSM), similar to Linux Security Modules (LSM), and an access control system called XSM-FLASK, which is their SELinux-based security framework. We'll see how Xen uses XSM, how to build Xen with XSM support, and finally, how we can apply policies to Xen domains.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Understanding Xen and XSM
  • Running XSM-enabled Xen
  • Applying custom XSM policies