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 Xen and XSM

The Xen Project is a Linux Foundation project that maintains the Xen hypervisor. While the Xen Project manages multiple security and virtualized-related software titles, our focus is on the Xen hypervisor.

Introducing the Xen hypervisor

The Xen hypervisor runs directly on top of hardware and sits in between the various virtual machines and the hardware itself. Unlike QEMU or KVM, which run as a process within Linux to offer the virtualization functionality, Xen works more independently. As a result, administrators will not see the running instances as separate processes. Instead, they need to rely on Xen commands and APIs to get more information and to interact with the Xen hypervisor.

Important note

As with libvirt, the Xen hypervisor uses the term domain to point to its guests. As we use the term domain frequently in SELinux to mean the SELinux type of a running process, and thus also the SELinux type of a running guest, we will use guest wherever...