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SELinux System Administration, Third Edition

You're reading from   SELinux System Administration, Third Edition Implement mandatory access control to secure applications, users, and information flows on Linux

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800201477
Length 458 pages
Edition 3rd Edition
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Author (1):
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Sven Vermeulen Sven Vermeulen
Author Profile Icon Sven Vermeulen
Sven Vermeulen
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Table of Contents (22) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Using SELinux
2. Chapter 1: Fundamental SELinux Concepts FREE CHAPTER 3. Chapter 2: Understanding SELinux Decisions and Logging 4. Chapter 3: Managing User Logins 5. Chapter 4: Using File Contexts and Process Domains 6. Chapter 5: Controlling Network Communications 7. Chapter 6: Configuring SELinux through Infrastructure-as-Code Orchestration 8. Section 2: SELinux-Aware Platforms
9. Chapter 7: Configuring Application-Specific SELinux Controls 10. Chapter 8: SEPostgreSQL – Extending PostgreSQL with SELinux 11. Chapter 9: Secure Virtualization 12. Chapter 10: Using Xen Security Modules with FLASK 13. Chapter 11: Enhancing the Security of Containerized Workloads 14. Section 3: Policy Management
15. Chapter 12: Tuning SELinux Policies 16. Chapter 13: Analyzing Policy Behavior 17. Chapter 14: Dealing with New Applications 18. Chapter 15: Using the Reference Policy 19. Chapter 16: Developing Policies with SELinux CIL 20. Assessments 21. Other Books You May Enjoy

Limiting the scope of transitions

For security reasons, Linux systems can reduce the ability of processes to gain elevated privileges under certain situations or provide additional constraints to reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities to be exploitable. SELinux developers, too, honor these situations.

Sanitizing environments on transition

When we execute a higher-privileged command (be it a setuid application or one where capabilities are added to the session), the GNU C library (glibc) will sanitize the environment. This means that a set of security-sensitive environment variables are discarded to make sure that attackers, malicious persons, or malicious applications cannot negatively influence the session.

This secure execution is controlled through an Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) auxiliary vector called AT_SECURE. When set, environment variables such as LD_PRELOAD, LD_AUDIT, LD_DEBUG, TMPDIR, and NLSPATH are removed from the session.

SELinux will force this...

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