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

Tuning systemd services, logging, and device management

systemd is a core component of many Linux distributions. Since its birth in 2010, many distributions have gradually adopted systemd as the core init system, responsible for handling services and boot-up operations.

Throughout its development phase, systemd added several other components to its portfolio:

  • D-Bus, which offers a system and session bus service allowing the use of D-Bus for inter-application communication, merged with systemd.
  • systemd also incorporated udev, which offers a flexible device-node management application.
  • Login capabilities were added to systemd, enabling fine-grained control over user sessions.
  • The journald daemon joined the systemd family to provide a new approach to system and service logging, replacing some of the functionality of standard system loggers.
  • The timerd daemon provides support for the time-based execution of tasks, replacing some of the functionality of standard...