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

Performing single-step analysis

Until now, we've covered a few methods of analyzing SELinux policies through command-line utilities such as seinfo and sesearch. These utilities can assist users in performing single-step analyses: they either provide immediate information about an SELinux object (which is mainly what seinfo is about) or are capable of querying direct SELinux rules (which is the scope of sesearch).

Not all capabilities of the seinfo and sesearch utilities have been discussed yet though, so let's see what other tricks these commands have up their sleeves.

Using different SELinux policy files

Many SELinux analysis tools, including seinfo and sesearch, can access both the currently loaded SELinux policy and a specified SELinux policy file. The latter allows developers to query SELinux policies of systems they do not have direct access to, for which direct access is cumbersome (such as mobile devices), or that have been used in previous situations (backups...