An easy way to deploy SELinux?

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Jul. 11, 2006

The good thing about SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is that it can really help you lock down a Linux system. The bad thing about SELinux is that it can be a real pain to put all those locks and chains in place in the first place.

To answer that, the SELinux Policy Editor (seedit) project has just released a new version of the program, seedit 2.0. If you've seen the earlier version, from Japan's Hitachi Software, you'll be pleased to know that almost everything about it has been changed, according to the project's Yuichi Nakamura.

SELinux originated as part of an NSA (National Security Agency) effort to create a truly secure operating system. An SELinux-based system has a strong, mandatory access control architecture built in from the code up. It also provides a mechanism to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. In short, SELinux is designed to separate application security problems from the underlying operating system.

The program is made up of Simplified Policy and tools. A Simplified Policy, in turn, is an SELinux policy written in SPDL (Simplified Policy Description Language). This hides the details of SELinux configurations by using name-based configuration and reducing the number of permissions an administrator must worry about.

What's probably the most interesting part to server administrators, who want to learn yet another language like they want a hole in their head, is that the program also includes a simple integrated development environment GUI to generate SPDL and manage SELinux policies.

SUSE administrators, who look closely at the raw language, will recognize some of SPDL's syntax as coming from AppArmor, Novell's Linux security system.

Linux being Linux, you can, of course, also use command line tools or write scripts.

From the control panel, though, you can generate policies, read the audit log, create policy templates and edit SPDL code. You can do almost everything about SELinux from the control panel.

Today, the program supports Fedora Core 5 and CentOS 4.3. The developers also believe that it will work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, but that has not been tested.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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