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

Limiting the scope of transitions

For security reasons, Linux systems can reduce the ability of processes to gain elevated privileges under certain situations or provide additional constraints to reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities to be exploitable. SELinux developers, too, honor these situations.

Sanitizing environments on transition

When we execute a higher-privileged command (be it a setuid application or one where capabilities are added to the session), the GNU C library (glibc) will sanitize the environment. This means that a set of security-sensitive environment variables are discarded to make sure that attackers, malicious persons, or malicious applications cannot negatively influence the session.

This secure execution is controlled through an Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) auxiliary vector called AT_SECURE. When set, environment variables such as LD_PRELOAD, LD_AUDIT, LD_DEBUG, TMPDIR, and NLSPATH are removed from the session.

SELinux will force this...