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 virtualization and the risks associated with it. We discussed how some of these risks can be mitigated through the same set of controls that SELinux offers, such as type enforcement (limiting what guests can do) and MCS confinement (isolating guests from each other).

Next, we covered how libvirt supports several virtualization technologies on Linux platforms and how it includes a technology called sVirt that enables SELinux integration, offering guest isolation and access controls. We saw how administrators can manipulate the sVirt logic within libvirt, such as using different domain labels or category sets.

Finally, we looked at Docker, a popular container technology, and how here too sVirt can provide container confinement both from an access control approach (limiting exploits and break-outs) as well as isolation (protecting one container from the actions of another). Here too, we looked at how the various SELinux controls can be fine-tuned by administrators...