Chapter 5. Working with SELinux
The following sections give a brief overview of the main SELinux packages in Fedora; installing and updating packages; which log files are used; the main SELinux configuration file; enabling and disabling SELinux; SELinux modes; configuring Booleans; temporarily and persistently changing file and directory labels; overriding file system labels with the mount command; mounting NFS file systems; and how to preserve SELinux contexts when copying and archiving files and directories.
In Fedora, the SELinux packages are installed by default, unless they are manually excluded during installation. By default, SELinux targeted policy is used, and SELinux runs in enforcing mode. The following is a brief description of the main SELinux packages:
policycoreutils: provides utilities, such as semanage, restorecon, audit2allow, semodule, load_policy, and setsebool, for operating and managing SELinux.
policycoreutils-gui: provides system-config-selinux, a graphical tool for managing SELinux.
selinux-policy: provides the SELinux Reference Policy. The SELinux Reference Policy is a complete SELinux policy, and is used as a basis for other policies, such as the SELinux targeted policy. Refer to the Tresys Technology
SELinux Reference Policy page for further information. The
selinux-policy-devel package provides development tools, such as
/usr/share/selinux/devel/policygentool and
/usr/share/selinux/devel/policyhelp, as well as example policy files. This package was merged into the
selinux-policy package.
selinux-policy-policy: provides SELinux policies. For targeted policy, install selinux-policy-targeted. For MLS, install selinux-policy-mls. In Fedora 8, the strict policy was merged into targeted policy, allowing confined and unconfined users to co-exist on the same system.
setroubleshoot-server: translates denial messages, produced when access is denied by SELinux, into detailed descriptions that are viewed with sealert (which is provided by this package).
setools,
setools-gui, and
setools-console: these packages provide the
Tresys Technology SETools distribution, a number of tools and libraries for analyzing and querying policy, audit log monitoring and reporting, and file context management
[]. The
setools package is a meta-package for SETools. The
setools-gui package provides the
apol,
seaudit, and
sediffx tools. The
setools-console package provides the
seaudit-report,
sechecker,
sediff,
seinfo,
sesearch,
findcon,
replcon, and
indexcon command line tools. Refer to the
Tresys Technology SETools page for information about these tools.
libselinux-utils: provides the avcstat, getenforce, getsebool, matchpathcon, selinuxconlist, selinuxdefcon, selinuxenabled, setenforce, togglesebool tools.
mcstrans: translates levels, such as s0-s0:c0.c1023, to an easier to read form, such as SystemLow-SystemHigh. This package is not installed by default.
To install packages in Fedora, as the Linux root user, run the yum install package-name command. For example, to install the mcstrans package, run the yum install mcstrans command. To upgrade all installed packages in Fedora, run the yum update command.
Note
In previous versions of Fedora, the selinux-policy-devel package is required when making a local policy module with audit2allow -M.
