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

Configuring podman

The podman utility is the default container management utility on CentOS 8 and other distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Other distributions such as Gentoo can also easily get access to podman by installing libpod.

Selecting podman over Docker

When we compare podman with Docker, we might not see a big difference when we are simply using it for basic container management operations. The commands are very similar, and podman even has a Docker compatibility layer that facilitates the usage of podman for administrators who are used to working with Docker.

Under the hood though, there are quite a few differences. For one, podman is a daemon-less container management system, which allows end users to easily run containers within their confined space. The libpod project also uses different design principles and supports a different container runtime, which supports the Open Container Initiative (OCI)-based definitions, called the Container Runtime...