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

Chapter 2. Understanding SELinux Decisions and Logging

Once SELinux is enabled on a system, it starts its access control functionality, as described in the previous chapter. This however might have some unknown side effects, so in this chapter, we will:

  • Switch between SELinux in full-enforcement mode (resembling a host-based intrusion prevention system) versus its permissive, logging-only mode (resembling a host-based intrusion detection system)

  • Use various methods to toggle the SELinux state (enabled or disabled, permissive or enforcing)

  • Disable SELinux's enforcement for a single domain rather than the entire system

  • Learn to interpret the SELinux log events that describe which activities SELinux has prevented

We will finish with an overview of common methods for analyzing these logging events in day-to-day operations.