I’m considering implementing SELinux in my Debian setup, but I’ve read that it was initially developed by the NSA.
Can anyone shed any light on this? Has SELinux been audited? When and by whom? Does the NSA still have anything to do with SELinux, or is this a “US Navy creating Tor” sort of scenario?
You must log in or register to comment.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 2.42K Posts
- 56.9K Comments
- Modlog
One question and some unfollowable advice.
Question: Why not use AppArmor? My understanding is that’s what Debian uses by default instead of Selinux which is more native to Enterprise Linux (Fedora, RHEL, Rocky, Alma etc).
Unfollowable advice: As an EL admin where it’s the default and very closely integrated, we have a saying; “It’s not always dns, mostly it’s Selinux”. For most distro-sourced software, it’s fine. But if you install software from other sources, you’re going to hit problems.
Others have given good reasons to your specific questions, but one tip if you go down this route. We use a redhat tool, “setroubleshoot-server” which helps hugely in both identifying when something isn’t working because SELinux has blocked it, but also gives you the commands to add an explicit rule to allow it, so you can view the log, understand why it’s blocking, and allow it without needing to get too involved with the complicated file contexts.
Sadly, it looks like this tool isn’t available in Debian, which would seem to make like a lot harder using selinux. Familiar as I am with selinux, I don’t run it on my personal servers or this laptop, which are Debian.
Thanks for the advice!