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)

Introducing labeled networking


Another approach to further fine-tune the access controls on network level is to introduce labeled networking. With labeled networking, security information is passed on between hosts (unlike SECMARK which only starts when the packet is received by the netfilter subsystem). This is also known as peer labeling, as the security information is passed on between hosts (peers).

The advantage of labeled networking is that security information is retained across the network, allowing an end-to-end enforcement on mandatory access control settings between systems, as well as retaining the sensitivity level of communication flows between systems. The major downside however is that this requires an additional network technology (protocol) that is able to manage labels on network packets or flows.

SELinux currently supports two implementations as part of the labeled networking approach: NetLabel/CIPSO and labeled IPSec. With NetLabel/CIPSO, only the sensitivity of the source...