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

Summary

Containerized workloads allow administrators to add capabilities quickly and easily to a system, while retaining possible dependencies within a container. Each container hosts its own dependencies, allowing containers to be removed and added from the system without affecting others. With SELinux, this workload is further isolated from the host and, in case of sVirt protections, also from each other.

We've seen how systemd has container support but lacks sVirt-based protections, and how podman can apply sVirt protections on its own container environments. We learned that Docker and podman are very similar in usage, yet different under the hood. Both frameworks allow us to apply different SELinux types to the containers and resources, and with udica we've learned how to create custom policies without much development effort. Finally, we've seen how Kubernetes can be configured to use SELinux labeling as well.

With all these SELinux-capable technologies behind...