Labels containing security-relevant information for SELinux.

Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) adds Mandatory Access Control (MAC) to the Linux kernel, and is enabled by default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A general purpose MAC architecture needs the ability to enforce an administratively-set security policy over all processes and files in the system

The following is an example of the labels containing security-relevant information that are used on processes, Linux users, and files, on Linux operating systems that run SELinux. This information is called the SELinux context, and is viewed using the ls -Z command:

$ ls -Z filename
-rwxrw-r– user1 group1 unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0 filename

On Linux operating systems that run SELinux, there are Linux users as well as SELinux users. SELinux users are part of SELinux policy. Linux users are mapped to SELinux users.

In this example, SELinux provides a user (unconfined_u), a role (object_r), a type (user_home_t), and a level (s0). This information is used to make access control decisions. With DAC, access is controlled based only on Linux user and group IDs. It is important to remember that SELinux policy rules are checked after DAC rules. SELinux policy rules are not used if DAC rules deny access first.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.