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You're reading from  SELinux Cookbook

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2014
Publisher
ISBN-139781783989669
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Sven Vermeulen
Sven Vermeulen
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Sven Vermeulen

Sven Vermeulen (sjvermeu on Twitter) is a long-term contributor to various free software projects and the author of several online guides and resources, including the Gentoo Handbook. He got his first taste of free software in 1997 and never looked back. Within SELinux, Sven contributed several policies to the Reference Policy project, and actively participated in policy development and user space development projects. In his daily job, Sven is an enterprise architect in a European financial institution as well as a self-employed solution engineer and consultant. Prior to this, he graduated with an MSE in computer engineering from Ghent University and an MSc in ICT enterprise architecture from IC Institute.
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Introduction


Web applications are a prime example of where SELinux can prove its effectiveness. They are often facing the (untrusted) Internet and are a popular target to exploit. Securing the web server and web applications is just one of the basic mitigating strategies though—by confining the web server, we are reducing the results of a successful exploit even further.

A well-confined web server will only allow operations towards the operating system that are acceptable behavior for the service. But considering the wide area of services that can be provided through a web server, we must be careful not to open up too many privileges.

Policy developers have foreseen the situation that the web server domain might be too broad in its privileges and have made the web server domain (httpd_t) not only very versatile, but also very configurable. In this chapter, we will look into the domain in more detail.

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SELinux Cookbook
Published in: Sep 2014Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781783989669

Author (1)

author image
Sven Vermeulen

Sven Vermeulen (sjvermeu on Twitter) is a long-term contributor to various free software projects and the author of several online guides and resources, including the Gentoo Handbook. He got his first taste of free software in 1997 and never looked back. Within SELinux, Sven contributed several policies to the Reference Policy project, and actively participated in policy development and user space development projects. In his daily job, Sven is an enterprise architect in a European financial institution as well as a self-employed solution engineer and consultant. Prior to this, he graduated with an MSE in computer engineering from Ghent University and an MSc in ICT enterprise architecture from IC Institute.
Read more about Sven Vermeulen