Book Image

SELinux System Administration

By : Sven Vermeulen
Book Image

SELinux System Administration

By: Sven Vermeulen

Overview of this book

NSA Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a set of patches and added utilities to the Linux kernel to incorporate a strong, flexible, mandatory access control architecture into the major subsystems of the kernel. With its fine-grained yet flexible approach, it is no wonder Linux distributions are firing up SELinux as a default security measure. SELinux System Administration covers the majority of SELinux features through a mix of real-life scenarios, descriptions, and examples. Everything an administrator needs to further tune SELinux to suit their needs are present in this book. This book touches on various SELinux topics, guiding you through the configuration of SELinux contexts, definitions, and the assignment of SELinux roles, and finishes up with policy enhancements. All of SELinux's configuration handles, be they conditional policies, constraints, policy types, or audit capabilities, are covered in this book with genuine examples that administrators might come across. By the end, SELinux System Administration will have taught you how to configure your Linux system to be more secure, powered by a formidable mandatory access control.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


We saw how to enable and disable SELinux both on a complete system level as well as a per service level using various methods: kernel boot options, SELinux configuration file, or plain commands. One of the commands is the use of semanage permissive, which can disable SELinux protections for a single service.

Next, we saw where SELinux log its events and how to interpret them, which is one of the most important capabilities of an administrator when dealing with SELinux. To assist us with this interpretation, there are tools such as setroubleshoot, sealert, and audit2why.

In the next chapter, we will look at the first administrative task on SELinux systems: managing user accounts and their associated SELinux roles and security clearances towards the resources on the system.