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

Using systemd containers


Another feature that systemd supports is systemd-nspawn. This service provides container capabilities in systemd and allows systemd to manage these containers. It uses the same primitives as the LXC project and Docker. SELinux-wise, the software that is running inside the container will not have a correct view on the SELinux state (as is the case with Docker).

However, unlike Docker and libvirt, the systemd-nspawn approach does not support the sVirt technology that we covered in the previous chapter. In other words, it will not dynamically reset the SELinux contexts of the used files, nor will it search for a free category pair to associate with the files and the processes.

Initializing a systemd container

To create a systemd container, first create a root file system in which the software that the container should run is deployed. It is advised to use the /var/lib/machines location, with a subdirectory per container, as this location will be the default location for...