Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Recently in my (physical) mailbox: SELinux by Example by Frank Mayer, Karl MacMillan, David Caplan. The most recent and up-to-date book about SELinux I know about, written by some of the most involved and knowledgeable people in the field.

From what I've read until now it seems to be a really in-depth and easy to understand introduction, and what's more important, it covers the practical aspects of how you use, configure, and administer SELinux in real deployed systems.

This should make an interesting read...

After you have installed a minimum SELinux setup in QEMU, you might want to tweak and edit the policy to fit your needs.

A nice, graphical method to do so is to use SLIDE, written by Tresys (and released under the terms of the GPL). SLIDE is an Eclipse (>= 3.1) plugin, which you can install easily:

• Click Help->Software Updates->Find and install...
• Click Search for new features to install, then New remote site
• Enter "http://www.tresys.com/files/eclipse-update/" as URL, click Finish.
• After that, select the new entry, and install SLIDE (will restart Eclipse).

Of course, you can also easily use your favourite text-editor to edit the plain policy files (if you use the te.vim file from Thomas Bleher you get syntax highlighting, at least for *.te files). After placing the file in the ~/.vim/syntax directory, add this to your ~/.vimrc:

if has("autocmd")
  filetype plugin on
  augroup te
    autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile          *.te set filetype=te
  augroup END
endif

Update: "Testing stuff with QEMU"-articles published so far:

• Part 3: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
• Part 2: MenuetOS, a tiny OS written in 100% assembly language
• Part 1: SELinux support in Debian unstable

Here's a quick HOWTO to get you started with the QEMU emulator, the Debian installer (etch beta 3), and SELinux. If you execute the following steps you'll be left with an SELinux-enabled Debian unstable QEMU image, but not with a complete working and perfectly configured SELinux system. A more detailed article about SELinux will probably follow...

Basic Debian unstable install in QEMU:

1. Install QEMU:
   apt-get install qemu
2. Download the latest Debian etch installer ISO image (etch beta 3, currently):
   wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/etch_di_beta3/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-binary-1.iso
3. Create a QEMU image which will hold the Debian installation:
   qemu-img create -f qcow /path/to/debian.img 5000M
4. Boot directly from the ISO image and install Debian into the QEMU image (I won't go into the details of the installation itself; Wolfang Lonien has nice HOWTOs for that: part 1, part 2, video):
   qemu -hda /path/to/debian.img -boot d -cdrom debian-testing-i386-binary-1.iso
5. After the installation is done, configure the system, tweak /etc/apt/sources.list if needed, and then dist-upgrade to the latest stuff:
   apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
6. That's about it for the basic Debian install, you can now shutdown the OS and QEMU (type "halt" in the emulated Debian, wait for the shutdown to complete, press CTRL+ALT+2 to switch to the QEMU console, and type "quit").

Creating a QEMU overlay image:

QEMU has a nice feature called overlay images which allows you to "clone" an image, where the new (overlay) image will only store the "diffs" to the original one, thus saving lots of space. This also allows you to remove the overlay image at any time and restart from the original image (which is nice for testing stuff which may break).

1. Create an overlay image based on the previously installed Debian image:
   qemu-img create -b /path/to/debian.img -f qcow /path/to/debian_selinux_overlay.img
2. Now boot into the new overlay image:
   qemu -hda /path/to/debian_selinux_overlay.img

Basic SELinux setup:

1. SELinux wants to label all the files on your system (all inodes actually), so your filesystem(s) need the so-called extended attributes (xattr) and "security labels" (both are kernel options) which most modern file systems now support. For ext3 (for example) you need these config options:
CONFIG_EXT3_FS=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_EXT3_FS_SECURITY=y
Luckily the Debian kernels are xattr-enabled by default so we don't have to do anything at all here.

2. Install the basic SELinux packages and the source package of the SELinux reference policy:
   apt-get install checkpolicy policycoreutils selinux-policy-refpolicy-src
3. I noticed a bug in the current Debian packages (the setfiles utility is in the wrong place, see #384850), but there's a simple workaround:
   ln -s /sbin/setfiles /usr/sbin/setfiles
4. Now we can (re-)label the file system:
   cd /etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy
make relabel
   This will build the reference policy from source and relabel your file system (this will take a while).
   There might be some warnings (and maybe you'll notice further bugs), but they seem not to be critical.
5. We can now (almost) enable SELinux, but before we can reboot we need to work around another bug (#384852), otherwise SELinux will not be enabled when we reboot:
   ln -s /etc/selinux/refpolicy/src /etc/selinux/targeted
6. Now reboot the emulated Debian system, and at the GRUB console add the kernel option selinux=1 to enable SELinux in the kernel (press "e" to edit the boot options).
7. You'll get tons of SELinux log messages while the system boots, that's normal at this point, don't worry.
   Then you can type "sestatus", which should print some information on the running SELinux system. If it says "SELinux status: disabled" something went wrong.

Congratulations! You now have a QEMU image with minimal SELinux support and you can start playing with it, tweaking the policy, finding and reporting bugs, reading tons of documentation on how SELinux actually works etc. etc.

As SELinux is (half?) a release-goal for Debian etch, it would be nice if many people could test it before the release, and this is one method to do so without breaking your production systems.

Update 2006-08-28: You don't really need user_xattr support for SELinux, only xattr support (for security.selinux xattrs) for the filesystem you use, which is available per default in Debian kernels (thanks Russell Coker).

• Anthony Towns is the new Debian Project Leader (DPL). Congratulations! More info: detailed results, Well, crap, vote analysis. Voting participation sucked again, only 43% of the Debian developers voted.
• Your daily paranoia/depression: AT&T forwards all Internet traffic into NSA, US wants access to EU "data retention" data, Bush's plans for Iran.
• Proof of concept virus for Linux and Windows. Again.
• The new NVIDIA Linux drivers (1.0-8756) now support more GPUs, support suspend-to-disk, and compile on Linux >= 2.6.16 without requiring patches.

In his latest blog post Bruce Schneier explains why data mining for terrorist patterns is pretty much useless and unsuccessful, while still killing our privacy.

In the words of Schneier:

We're not trading privacy for security; we're giving up privacy and getting no security in return.

I couldn't agree more.