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

Automating system management with Puppet

Puppet is the third automation framework that we will check out. It is the oldest one in our list, with its first release in 2005, and is commonly seen as the baseline against which other automation frameworks are compared. It has commercial backing through the Puppet company, also often referred to as Puppet Labs.

How Puppet works

Like SaltStack, Puppet uses an agent/server-based model with public-key authentication of the agents to ensure no rogue agents are active within the environment.

The Puppet master has access to the Puppet manifests, which is the declaration of the state that Puppet wants to achieve. These manifests use a specific language inspired by Ruby and can refer to classes provided by modules to ensure reusability across the environment.

Puppet modules, hence, are the workhorse within Puppet, and Puppet has a significant community called Puppet Forge that allows you to download and install modules created by the...