SELinux System Administration

A comprehensive guide to walk you through SELinux access controls

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.

What you will learn from this book

• Enable and disable features selectively or even enforce them to a granular level
• Interpret SELinux logging to make security-conscious decisions
• Assign new contexts and sensitivity labels to files and other resources
• Work with mod_selinux to secure web applications
• Use tools like sudo, runcon, and newrole to switch roles and run privileged commands in a safe environment
• Use iptables to assign labels to network packets
• Configure IPSec and NetLabel to transport SELinux contexts over the wire
• Build your own SELinux policies using reference policy interfaces