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 SELinux with systemd's container support

In Chapter 7, Configuring Application-Specific SELinux Controls, we introduced systemd as an SELinux-aware application suite, capable of launching different services with configurable SELinux contexts. Besides service support, systemd has quite a few other features up its sleeve. One of these features is systemd-nspawn.

With systemd-nspawn, systemd provides container capabilities, allowing administrators to interact with systemd-managed containers in an integrated way, almost as if these containers were services themselves. It uses the same primitives as LXC from the Linux Containers project (which was the predecessor of the modern container frameworks) and Docker, based upon namespaces (hence the n in nspawn).

Informational note

The Linux Containers project has a product called LXC that combines several isolation and resource management services within the Linux kernel, such as control groups (cgroups) and namespace isolation...