[Techtalk] SELinux and Fedora Core 3

[Caitlyn Martin]

Hi, Percilla, and everyone else,

--- percila orphan <millward at Ms.UManitoba.CA> wrote:

> What is this SELinux and what is it suppose to do?

NSA Security Enhanced Linux (the full name) is
designed to give finer grained security than teh
standard UNIX permissions standard.  It's also
supposed to be a more secure method of authentication.

> What does it really do? ( software rarely does what
> its suppose to do anyway ).

SELinux pretty much does.

> Who wrote it 

The United States National Security Agency, which is
part of our federal government.  It started out as a
separate Red Hat based distro and evolved into an
add-on to a normal Red Hat or Fedora installation.

> and why does it have to be included
> in Fedora at all? 

The original purpose was for federal secure systems
(everything from NSA, CIA, DOD, etc.. to mission
critical systems at any other agency, such as EPA
where I used to work) to be truly secure from folks
internal and external who want to do something other
than what is supposed to be done on a given system. 
It was meant to allow federal agencies to adopt Linux
and have superior security that, oh... Microsoft
Windows.  The intentions are very good for the Open
Source movement.

SELinux is something that you can turn off at install
time and simply not have it in FC3.  It is NOT being
forced down anyone's throat.

Regards,
Cait
(who once had to write a whitepaper on SELinux)


		


		
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