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 looked at a number of SELinux use cases and tuned the system to use SELinux capabilities to enhance the security of the services.

For the web server, we architected the entire setup to manage the different risk profiles of the websites across multiple systems, tuning SELinux on each of those systems. We saw how multiple instances can be started, each with its own category set, and how their content can be managed in a secure manner. We also saw how to differentiate between administrative roles for the same system, and we finished with network-related tunings.

Next, we saw how a shell-service-providing server can be hardened further, splitting the SSH daemon for two different purposes and running both with a different category set. We looked at fine-tuning the file system for chrooted access, and we even used a customized login so that a user receives a different SELinux context based on the SSH instance he (or she) logs in through.

Finally, we looked at an NFS server...