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

SELinux-secured virtualization


Virtualization is part of many infrastructural services. Ever since its inception in the early 70s as a means of isolating workloads and abstracting hardware dependencies, virtualization implementations have grown. When we look at service offerings today, we realize that many cloud providers would be out of service if it weren't for virtualization.

One of the services that virtualization offers is isolation, which SELinux can support and augment quite nicely.

Introducing virtualization

When we look at virtualization, we look at the abstraction layers it provides in order to hide certain resource views (such as hardware or processing power). Virtualization contributes to the development of more efficient hardware usage (which results in better cost control), centralized views on resources and systems, more flexibility in the number of operating systems that the company can deal with, standardization of resource allocation, and even improved security services.

There...