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

Assigning common policies to new applications

In between the strong isolation of an SELinux sandbox and the broad permissions of unconfined domains (or even permissive domains) sits the sufficiently privileged application domain. For most administrators, having a proper SELinux domain for applications is the best way forward, as it allows all the common behaviors and restricts unwanted ones.

When we start looking at application domains, however, we notice that there is differentiation in complexity, and as an administrator, we need to understand what the complexity is about before we can make the right choice.

Understanding domain complexity

SELinux is able to provide full system confinement: each and every application runs in its own restricted environment that it cannot break out of. But that requires fine-grained policies that are developed as quickly as the new releases of all the applications they confine.

Developing fine-grained policies at this speed is not possible...