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| Home > Security-Enhanced Linux | |
| Security-Enhanced Linux
Introduction The National Security Agency (NSA) released Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) in December of 2000 under the General Public License (GPL). An integration of the Flask mandatory access control (MAC) architecture with Linux, SELinux provides a flexible mechanism to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. This integration of MAC mechanisms into a mainstream operating system has allowed the NSA to transfer such security concepts to a wider community and demonstrate their viability. SELinux addresses the threats of tampering and the bypass of application security mechanisms, and can strictly confine any damage caused by malicious or flawed applications. The MITRE Corporation has been involved with the SELinux project since 2000, beginning with the modification of several user utilities to provide SELinux-related information to the user. Since then, MITRE's contribution to the SELinux community has been two-fold: development of individual application policies (roughly between 2000 and 2002), and the design and development of SELinux policy management tools. Publications MITRE's SELinux group has published a small number of papers on the theory and applications of this technology.
Automated Policy Generation The MITRE policy generation tools, polgen, provide a systematic way to generate policy for programs on an SELinux system. Specifically, polgen attempts to generate policy for a program based on patterns in the program's behavior. The policy that polgen suggests is tailored to the behavior of the program and includes suggestions for new system types when appropriate to support least-privilege on an SELinux system. This process is predictable and repeatable, but interactive. The user, presented with a suggested policy description, can modify that description before actual policy is produced. The current version of polgen is included here. NOTE: Please read through the license listed here before downloading the SLAT distribution. Download of the distribution indicates acceptance of the license terms.
Automated Policy Analysis The SELinux Analysis Tools (SLAT) provide a systematic way to determine if security goals are achieved by a given SELinux policy configuration. In particular, SLAT is concerned with information flow security goals, which describe desired paths by which information moves throughout a system. We provide a simple syntax in which to express these goals. We envision SLAT usage to be ongoing: whenever a system's policy configuration is modified, SLAT can be used to ensure continued enforcement of the pre-existing security goals. Included here are a paper describing the theoretical underpinnings of SLAT, and the software distribution. NOTE: Please read through the license listed here before downloading the SLAT distribution. Download of the distribution indicates acceptance of the license terms.
Application Policies MITRE's apache policy was merged into the example policy as the original httpd policy in September of 2001, and has been further maintained and developed by others since then. The original policy and documentation included here.
MITRE also developed a policy for sendmail that was not merged into the example policy.
Please note that these policies were written for older versions of SELinux. They may not build with the current policy, and are provided here for reference only. For more information, please contact Brian Sniffen using the employee directory. Page last updated: April 27, 2006 | Top of page |
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