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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.
Read more about Sven Vermeulen

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Auditing system behavior


Another approach to debugging application behavior is through Linux auditing, especially when it is not clear which process is responsible for performing a specific action, as this might make SELinux development a lot more difficult. When developers do not know which domain(s) they need to update privileges for, or do not know how exactly a resource is created, then the Linux audit subsystem can help.

With the Linux auditing subsystem, administrators can enable rules to log activities. In the audit log, the SELinux context of the subject (process) is shown as well, allowing SELinux developers to properly identify the domain to work with.

How to do it…

Let's look at how we can ask the Linux audit subsystem which process is responsible for creating a particular directory in a user's home directory through the following steps:

  1. As the root Linux user (and in an SELinux role with sufficient privileges), tell the audit subsystem to log all write- and attribute-changing operations...

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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