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

Running XSM-enabled Xen

Switching from a regular Xen deployment to an XSM-enabled Xen deployment is a matter of rebuilding Xen with XSM support and rebooting the system. Xen comes with an out-of-the-box policy that can be readily applied, which we will use as part of our XSM endeavor.

Rebuilding Xen with XSM support

Let's rebuild the Xen hypervisor and tools on the system with XSM support:

  1. Clean up the previous build by running the make clean command inside the build directory (xen-4.13.1 in our example):
    $ make clean
  2. Inside the build directory, go to the xen directory:
    $ cd xen
  3. Launch the Xen configuration using make menuconfig:
    $ make menuconfig
  4. Navigate to the XSM setting and enable the XSM-related parameters:
    Common Features --->
      [*] Xen Security Modules support
      [*]   FLux Advanced Security Kernel support
      [*]     Compile Xen with a built-in FLAS security 
       ...