Simplicity is a form of art...

Using pam_selinux to switch contexts

With SELinux managing the access controls of applications towards the resources on the system, a not-to-be forgotten important component on any Unix/Linux system is the authentication part. Most systems use or support PAM, the Pluggable Authentication Modules, and for SELinux this plays an important role.

Applications that are PAM-enabled …

Local policy management script

I've written a small script that I call selocal which manages locally needed SELinux rules. It allows me to add or remove SELinux rules from the command line and have them loaded up without needing to edit a .te file and building the .pp file manually. If you are interested …

Lots of work on supporting swig-2

The SELinux setools package provides a few of the commands I used the most when working with SELinux: sesearch for looking through the policy and seinfo to get information on type/attribute/role/... from the currently loaded policy.

This package uses swig, the Simplified (sic) Wrapper and Interface Generator to …

Dynamic transitions in SELinux

In between talks on heap spraying techniques and visualization of data for fast analysis, I'm working on integrating the chromium SELinux policy that was offered in bug bug #412637 within Gentoo Hardened. If you take a look at the bug, you notice I'm not really fond of the policy because …

Transitioning to MCS policies

Since I started maintaining the SELinux policies for Gentoo Hardened, the policy types we supported were primarily strict and targeted. About half a year ago, we also started supported mcs and offered the possibility for using mls as well (but didn't really support that one).

With the recent release of …

Trying out initramfs with selinux and grsec

I'm no fan of initramfs. All my systems boot up just fine without it, so I often see it as an additional layer of obfuscation. But there are definitely cases where initramfs is needed, and from the looks of it, we might be needing to push out some documentation and …

Unix domain sockets are files

Probably not a first for many seasoned Linux administrators, and probably not correct accordingly to more advanced users than myself, but I just found out that Unix domain sockets are files. Even when they're not.

I have been looking at a weird SELinux denial I had occuring on my system …

Some people on #selinux are ... dolphins

A very useful resource for anyone working on or with SELinux policies is the #selinux chat channel on irc.freenode.net. People like Dominick Grift and Dan Walsh you would first think are IRC bots (being online all the time, answering questions), but I recently read that they must be …

Policy 25, 26

Recently I've seen quite a few messages on IRC pop up about policy.25 or even policy.26 so I harassed the guys in the chat channel to talk about it. Apparently, these new binary policy formats add support for filename transitions and non-process role transitions.

Currently, when you initiate …

SELinux file contexts

If you have been working with SELinux for a while, you know that file contexts are an important part of the policy and its enforcement. File contexts are used to inform the SELinux tools which type a file, directory, socket, ... should have. These types are then used to manage the …