Introducing SELinux
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a security framework in the Linux kernel for managing the access control policies of system resources. It supports a combination of the MAC, RBAC, and MLS models that were described in the previous section. SELinux is a set of kernel-space security modules and user-space command-line utilities, and it provides a mechanism for system administrators to have control over who can access what on the system. SELinux is designed to also protect a system against possible misconfigurations and potentially compromised processes.
SELinux was introduced by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a collection of Linux Security Modules (LSMs) with kernel updates. SELinux was eventually released to the open source community in 2000 and into Linux starting with the 2.6 kernel series in 2003.
So, how does SELinux work? We'll look at this next.
Working with SELinux
SELinux uses security policies to define various access control...
