11 Aug
One thing that I would like to get fixed for Lenny is the shared objects which can reduce the security of a system. Almost a year ago I blogged about the libsmpeg0 library which is listed as requiring an executable stack [1]. I submitted a two-line patch which fixes the problem while making [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
3 Comments
04 Aug
I have been asked about the current status of Lenny SE Linux on the Desktop.
The first thing to consider is the combinations of policies and configurations. I will number them if only for the purpose of this post, if the numbering is considered generally helpful it could be more widely adopted to describe configurations.
Default [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
2 Comments
02 Aug
When I first packaged the SE Linux policy for Debian the only way to adjust the policy was to edit the source files and recompile. Often changes that you might desire involved changing macros so while it would have been theoretically possible to just tack a few type definitions and allow rules at the [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
No Comments
02 Aug
I have written a script named postfix-nochroot to disable the chroot functionality of Postfix. I plan to initially include this in the selinux-basics package in Debian, but if the script was adopted by the Postfix package or some other package that seems more appropriate then I would remove it from selinux-basics.
The reason for disabling [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
2 Comments
01 Aug
I have written a script for Debian named selinux-activate which is included in selinux-basics version 0.3.3+nmu1 (which I have uploaded to Debian/Unstable). The script when run with no parameters will change the GRUB configuration to include selinux=1 on the kernel command-line and enable SE Linux support in the PAM modules for login, gdm, and [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
5 Comments
31 Jul
Currently Debian/Lenny contains all packages needed to run SE Linux apart from the policy. The policy package is missing because it needs to sit in unstable for a while before migrating to testing (Lenny), and I keep fixing bugs and uploading new versions.
I have set up my own APT repository for SE Linux packages [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
5 Comments
29 Jul
SE Linux is almost ready to use in Lenny. Currently I am waiting on the packages libsepol1 version 2.0.30-2, policycoreutils 2.0.49-3, and selinux-policy-default version 0.0.20080702-4 to make their way to testing. The first two should get there soon, the policy will take a little longer as I just made a new upload today [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
4 Comments
28 Jul
Michael Janke has written an interesting article about data flows in networks [1], he describes how data from the Internet should be considered to have low integrity (he refers to it as “untrusted”) and that as you get closer to the more important parts of the system it needs to be of higher integrity.
It seems [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
4 Comments
24 Jul
One of the most significant tasks performed by a SE Linux system is loading the “policy“. The policy is the set of rules which determine what actions are permitted by each domain.
When I first started using SE Linux (in 2001) the kernel knew where to find the policy file and would just read the [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
No Comments
13 Jul
I have just uploaded new SE Linux policy packages for Debian/Unstable which will go into Lenny (provided that the FTP masters approve the new packages in time).
The big change is that there are no longer separate packages for strict and targeted policies. There is now a package named selinux-policy-default which has the features of [...]
Posted in Security by: etbe
5 Comments