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 14: Dealing with New Applications

New applications are often not yet supported through an application-specific SELinux policy, as most application projects do not develop the SELinux policies themselves, but rely on the community in general (or Linux distributions more specifically) to create and maintain them. Some Linux distributions have implemented fallbacks to allow these applications to run, even though they might not be isolated properly. Administrators might not like the sound of having untrusted new applications running without any SELinux enforcements active though.

Hence, this chapter covers how administrators can run new applications in a number of isolated environments, ranging from the (often default) unprotected domains, to sandbox systems, and eventually by reusing existing SELinux domains without having to develop completely new ones.

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

  • Running applications without restrictions...