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AppArmor is Dead

For some time there have been two mainstream Mandatory Access Control (MAC) [1] systems for Linux. SE Linux [2] and AppArmor [3].

In late 2007 Novell laid off almost all the developers of AppArmor [4] with the aim of having the community do all the coding. Crispin Cowan (the founder and leader of the AppArmor […]

DNS Secondaries and Web Security

At the moment there are ongoing security issues related to web based services and DNS hijacking. the Daily Ack has a good summary of the session hijacking issue [1].

For a long time it has been generally accepted that you should configure a DNS server to not allow random machines on the Internet to copy […]

Ownership of the Local SE Linux Policy

A large part of the disagreement about the way to manage the policy seems to be based on who will be the primary “owner” of the policy on the machine. This isn’t a problem that only applies to SE Linux, the same issue applies for various types of configuration files and scripts throughout the process […]

SE Linux Policy Packaging for a Distribution

Caleb Case (Ubuntu contributer and Tresys employee) has written about the benefits of using separate packages for SE Linux policy modules [1].

Firstly I think it’s useful to consider some other large packages that could be split into multiple packages. The first example that springs to mind is coreutils which used to be textutils, shellutils, […]

Executable Stacks in Lenny

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 no code […]

Lenny SE Linux on the Desktop

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.

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Upgrading SE Linux Policy

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 end, […]

Postfix and chroot

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 […]

selinux-activate

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 kdm. […]

Installing SE Linux on Lenny

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 […]