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 sandboxed applications

New applications that should only have very limited privileges, and that are untrusted by nature, should be confined completely. While we could look at custom SELinux policies for these applications, this is hardly possible for each and every application out there.

Instead, we can consider sandboxing the applications, isolating their access from the system. With the help of some other Linux primitives such as namespace support, a utility has been created called the SELinux sandbox, which launches applications in a tightly confined domain. This is mostly meant for end user applications.

Important note

The SELinux sandbox, its SELinux policy, and the command associated with it, is specific to Linux distributions that use or follow Red Hat packages, such as CentOS. It might not be available for your Linux distribution.

For service-oriented domains, using the container runtime and protection measures are more suited. For more information about using...