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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned how file contexts are stored as extended attributes on the file system and how we can manipulate the contexts of files and other file system resources. Next, we found out where SELinux keeps its definitions on what contexts are to be assigned to which files.

We also learned to work with the semanage tool to manipulate this information and worked with a few tools that use this information to enforce contexts on resources.

On the process level, we got our first taste of SELinux policies, identifying when a process is launched inside a certain SELinux domain. With it, we covered the sesearch and seinfo applications to query the SELinux policy. Finally, we looked at some of Linux's security implementations that limit the transition scope of applications, which also influences SELinux domain transitions.

In the next chapter, we will expand our knowledge of protecting the operating system through the networking-related features of SELinux.