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

Summary

Automation frameworks such as Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, and Chef can be easily used to manage SELinux settings on a multitude of systems. While not all frameworks can deal with SELinux settings natively, this is easily mitigated by either using community-provided modules or by creating custom rules that check and update the settings accordingly. In this chapter, we've seen how to accomplish this by installing a custom, CIL-based SELinux policy.

We learned that these frameworks all have their specific approaches. Ansible, for instance, does not use any software installations on remote systems and communicates with the target systems using SSH. The other frameworks all use an agent/server model but have their own views on configuring settings (the syntax between Puppet and SaltStack is noticeably different) or design (Chef uses a workstation where developers have their development environment). All these frameworks are easily put in place and configured and can handle...