Simplicity is a form of art...

SELinux Userspace 2.7

A few days ago, Jason "perfinion" Zaman stabilized the 2.7 SELinux userspace on Gentoo. This release has quite a few new features, which I'll cover in later posts, but for distribution packagers the main change is that the userspace now has many more components to package. The project has split up the policycoreutils package in separate packages so that deployments can be made more specific.

Let's take a look at all the various userspace packages again, learn what their purpose is, so that you can decide if they're needed or not on a system. Also, when I cover the contents of a package, be aware that it is based on the deployment on my system, which might or might not be a complete installation (as with Gentoo, different USE flags can trigger different package deployments).

Authenticating with U2F

In order to further secure access to my workstation, after the switch to Gentoo sources, I now enabled two-factor authentication through my Yubico U2F USB device. Well, at least for local access - remote access through SSH requires both userid/password as well as the correct SSH key, by chaining authentication methods in OpenSSH.

Enabling U2F on (Gentoo) Linux is fairly easy. The various guides online which talk about the pam_u2f setup are indeed correct that it is fairly simple. For completeness sake, I've documented what I know on the Gentoo Wiki, as the pam_u2f article.

Using nVidia with SELinux

Yesterday I've switched to the gentoo-sources kernel package on Gentoo Linux. And with that, I also attempted (succesfully) to use the propriatary nvidia drivers so that I can enjoy both a smoother 3D experience while playing minecraft, as well as use the CUDA support so I don't need to use cloud-based services for small exercises.

The move to nvidia was quite simple, as the nvidia-drivers wiki article on the Gentoo wiki was quite easy to follow.

Switch to Gentoo sources

You've might already read it on the Gentoo news site, the Hardened Linux kernel sources are removed from the tree due to the grsecurity change where the grsecurity Linux kernel patches are no longer provided for free. The decision was made due to supportability and maintainability reasons.

That doesn't mean that users who want to stick with the grsecurity related hardening features are left alone. Agostino Sarubbo has started providing sys-kernel/grsecurity-sources for the users who want to stick with it, as it is based on minipli's unofficial patchset. I seriously hope that the patchset will continue to be maintained and, who knows, even evolve further.

Personally though, I'm switching to the Gentoo sources, and stick with SELinux as one of the protection measures. And with that, I might even start using my NVidia graphics card a bit more, as that one hasn't been touched in several years (I have an Optimus-capable setup with both an Intel integrated graphics card and an NVidia one, but all attempts to use nouveau for the one game I like to play - minecraft - didn't work out that well).

Handling certificates in Gentoo Linux

I recently created a new article on the Gentoo Wiki titled Certificates which talks about how to handle certificate stores on Gentoo Linux. The write-up of the article (which might still change name later, because it does not handle everything about certificates, mostly how to handle certificate stores) was inspired by the observation that I had to adjust the certificate stores of both Chromium and Firefox separately, even though they both use NSS.

I missed FOSDEM

I sadly had to miss out on the FOSDEM event. The entire weekend was filled with me being apathetic, feverish and overall zombie-like. Yes, sickness can be cruel. It wasn't until today that I had the energy back to fire up my laptop.

Sorry for the crew that I promised to meet at FOSDEM. I'll make it up, somehow.

SELinux System Administration, 2nd Edition

While still working on a few other projects, one of the time consumers of the past half year (haven't you noticed? my blog was quite silent) has come to an end: the SELinux System Administration - Second Edition book is now available. With almost double the amount of pages and a serious update of the content, the book can now be bought either through Packt Publishing itself, or the various online bookstores such as Amazon.

With the holidays now approaching, I hope to be able to execute a few tasks within the Gentoo community (and of the Gentoo Foundation) and get back on track. Luckily, my absence was not jeopardizing the state of SELinux in Gentoo thanks to the efforts of Jason Zaman.

We do not ship SELinux sandbox

A few days ago a vulnerability was reported in the SELinux sandbox user space utility. The utility is part of the policycoreutils package. Luckily, Gentoo's sys-apps/policycoreutils package is not vulnerable - and not because we were clairvoyant about this issue, but because we don't ship this utility.

Custom CIL SELinux policies in Gentoo

In Gentoo, we have been supporting custom policy packages for a while now. Unlike most other distributions, which focus on binary packages, Gentoo has always supported source-based packages as default (although binary packages are supported as well).

A recent commit now also allows CIL files to be used.

Maintaining packages and backporting

A few days ago I committed a small update to policycoreutils, a SELinux related package that provides most of the management utilities for SELinux systems. The fix was to get two patches (which are committed upstream) into the existing release so that our users can benefit from the fixed issues without having to wait for a new release.