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 5: Controlling Network Communications

The SELinux mandatory access controls go much beyond its file and process access controls. One of the features provided by SELinux is its ability to control network communications. By default, general network access controls use the socket-based access control mechanism, but more detailed approaches are also possible.

In this chapter, we will learn how network access controls are governed by SELinux, cover what administrators can do to further strengthen network communications using iptables, and describe how SELinux policies can be used for cross-system security through labeled IPsec. We'll finish the chapter with an introduction to CIPSO labeling and its integration with SELinux.

We cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Controlling process communications
  • Linux firewalling and SECMARK support
  • Securing high-speed InfiniBand networks
  • Understanding labeled networking
  • Using labeled IPsec with SELinux...