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 6: Configuring SELinux through Infrastructure-as-Code Orchestration

With the advent of large distributed application platforms, cloud services, and the high adoption of virtualized infrastructure, system administrators are actively managing their systems through Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks: orchestration and configuration tooling that uses source code-like information to manage the systems.

In this chapter, administrators will learn how to distribute and load custom SELinux policy modules, set file context definitions and apply those to the systems, set the permissive state of the system or SELinux domains, configure the SELinux settings on the systems, and how to customize SELinux actions if they are not supported by the tooling. We will apply this with four popular automation frameworks: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Introducing the target settings and policies
  • Using Ansible for SELinux system...