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 Ansible for SELinux system administration

The first orchestration and automation tooling we'll consider is Ansible, a very popular open source solution for the remote management of systems. Ansible has commercial backing through Red Hat but does not limit its support to Red Hat or even Linux systems. Other environments such as Windows environments or even network setups have significant Ansible-based support.

How Ansible works

Ansible generally uses a central server that hosts the configuration and interprets the settings. The Ansible runtime then connects to the remote systems over SSH, sending the necessary data to a temporary location, and then executes the steps locally.

The use of SSH as its main connection approach has significant advantages: administrators know how this protocol works and how to configure and control it. Furthermore, Ansible does not require any additional deployments on the target machines, except for Python and libselinux's Python...