danwalsh

REPOSTING WITH SOME FIXES

One  of the problems I face, is trying to convince people to use new security products.   They say, "Sure just don't break anything".  The problem is I need Guinea pigs to find out what I break.  In the case of confining the user, I have a problem.  I believe this can be a big security step forward, but how do I get people to use it, if it is not fully tested out?  How do I test it out without getting people to use it?

Now I have taken some involuntary test subjects like my wife, and set her up with a confined user account and worked with her to fix problems in xguest.  I have also taken the Jonas Salk approach and tested on my self.  I have been running as the staff_u user for the entire run of Rawhide since Fedora 8.

So I am now beginning to Beg co-workers to try it out.  As people start to install Fedora 9, I want them to try out confined users.  The simplest user for an engineer to try is staff_u with a transition to unconfined_t when you become root.

This is how I set this up.

First you need to modify the SELinux user record to allow it to reach the unconfined_r.  You also want to allow it to reach the system_r since you might be restarting services which need to run as system_r.  The command is a little ugly but follow along

# semanage user -m -R"staff_r unconfined_r system_r" staff_u
This tells the system to modify the staff_u user and allow it to reach the staff_r, unconfined_r and system_r roles.

Now we need to modify the login account to login as the staff_u SELinux user.

We can either change the default, so all users by default will login as the staff_u user.

# semanage login -m -s staff_u __default__

Or we can add a record just for my Linux user "dwalsh"

# semanage login -a -s staff_u -r s0-s0:c0.c1023 dwalsh

Finally I want to setup a sudo to allow me to transition from staff_t to unconfined_t when running commands using sudo.

Add a record like to following using visudo

dwalsh  ALL=(ALL) TYPE=unconfined_t ROLE=unconfined_r   ALL

Now logout and log back in and you should be running as staff_u:staff_r:staff_t,

Execute "sudo sh" and you should be running as staff_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t.

One caveat for this environment is currently userhelper apps will not work (system-config-*) when executed from staff_t,  But you can run them from the sudo root account.

What does this buy you?  While running in staff_t you will not be allowed to run any setuid application that is not confined.  So if somehow you were tricked into running a setuid app on your machine to become root, it will fail.  You will automatically transition to nsplugin so  your firefox will have confinement.  The ONLY way to become root/unconfined_t is through sudo, which is a well studied application.  If you run attempt to run su, you will be denied.

So do I have any volunteers????

I am fixing a typo in the command above sorry about reposting.

Also if you want to reverse the changes listed above

You could execute

semanage login -d dwalsh

Will remove the record and put dwalsh back to the default.

# semanage login -m -s unconfined_u __default__

Would set the default logins to be unconfined_u (the default)