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 11: Enhancing the Security of Containerized Workloads

Container platforms and management frameworks provide application-level abstraction to administrators and developers. Lightweight container frameworks allow for rapid development and deployment of new applications, whereas heavier container platforms allow for optimal resource consumption and highly resilient hosting platforms.

SELinux plays a vital role in many of these frameworks and platforms, ensuring that untrusted containers cannot escape or interact with resources they are not supported to interact with. In this chapter, we look at how SELinux is supported, ranging from systemd-nspawn to podman (and Docker), and finally in larger environments with Kubernetes. We also learn how to create custom SELinux domains for containers using the udica utility.

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

  • Using SELinux with systemd's container support
  • Configuring podman
  • Leveraging...