Book Image

SELinux System Administration - Second Edition

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux System Administration - Second Edition

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

Do you have the crucial job of protecting your private and company systems from malicious attacks and undefined application behavior? Are you looking to secure your Linux systems with improved access controls? Look no further, intrepid administrator! This book will show you how to enhance your system’s secure state across Linux distributions, helping you keep application vulnerabilities at bay. This book covers the core SELinux concepts and shows you how to leverage SELinux to improve the protection measures of a Linux system. You will learn the SELinux fundamentals and all of SELinux’s configuration handles including conditional policies, constraints, policy types, and audit capabilities. These topics are paired with genuine examples of situations and issues you may come across as an administrator. In addition, you will learn how to further harden the virtualization offering of both libvirt (sVirt) and Docker through SELinux. By the end of the book you will know how SELinux works and how you can tune it to meet your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
SELinux System Administration - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Hardening web servers


Web servers are a common infrastructural service in many architectures. They are also often exposed to the Internet (either directly or behind a reverse proxy, which might enable additional security controls) and as such are more vulnerable to attacks than backend services such as database systems.

Web servers can host various types of content, ranging from static websites to dynamic websites, right on to web services that are used in a microservice architecture. Regardless of their application focus, SELinux is ready to support the web server.

Describing the situation

Before embarking on a SELinux configuration and tuning spree, it is wise to describe the situation properly. By looking at the situation and investigating its various requirements, administrators will be able to get a better view of the architecture and make decisions that benefit the secure state of the system. It often pays off to draw the situation as well, as a schematic is often more powerful than an...