Security Strategies in Linux Platforms and Applications, 3rd Edition

Security Enhanced Linux

SELinux was developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as a mandatory access control system. It provides an additional layer of protection using Linux security modules included in the kernel. The NSA helped Red Hat integrate SELinux into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Because the NSA released the source code for SELinux under open source licenses, the same software is available for other Linux distributions.

NOTE

Because SELinux is primarily used on Red Hat systems, the focus of this section is on Red Hat–based configuration files. Nevertheless, it’s possible to configure SELinux on other AppArmor-focused distributions, ...