Author archive

Fedora 9 and Summit preview: Confining the user with SELinux

This one’s a two-fer! Dan Walsh covers the evolution of SELinux from Fedora 2 all the way to the upcoming Fedora 9 launch. Find out how it started and how user access controls will grow in the newest release. As a bonus, this is also a preview of Walsh’s scheduled talk at the upcoming Red Hat Summit. Want more? Check out the schedule of talks and register–and we’ll see you in Boston.

History

When SELinux was first developed, the goal was to confine as many system processes as possible to the least amount of privilege required. Fedora 2 was released with SELinux policy that confined users as well as system processes. We quickly realized that SELinux policy was not mature enough to handle a modern mainstream desktop operating system. After a quick redesign of the policy, we created “targeted” policy, replacing the previously named “strict” policy. The goal of targeted policy was to “target” certain processes in the operating system for confinement and leave the rest of the processes “unconfined.” » Read more


A step-by-step guide to building a new SELinux policy module

Who’s afraid of SELinux? Well, if you are, you shouldn’t be! Thanks to the introduction of new GUI tools, customizing your system’s protection by creating new policy modules is easier than ever. In this article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process.
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What’s new in SELinux for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5?

Dan Walsh will be presenting an overview of “What’s new with SELinux in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5″ at the Red Hat Summit on Wednesday May 9th at 3:00 PM in the “What’s New” Track. This article presents some of the material from that talk, and was written with frequent magazine contributor Len DiMaggio.
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