Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

Protecting network ports

Each network daemon that's running on your system has a specific network port or set of network ports assigned to it, on which it will listen. The /etc/services file contains a list of common daemons and their associated network ports, but it doesn't prevent someone from configuring a daemon to listen on some non-standard port. So, without some mechanism to prevent it, some sneaky intruder could potentially plant some sort of malware that would cause a daemon to listen on a non-standard port, possibly listening for commands from its master.

SELinux protects against this sort of malicious activity by only allowing daemons to listen on certain ports. Use semanage to look at the list of allowed ports:

[donnie@localhost ...