danwalsh

On an SELinux enabled machine, why does getenforce in a container say it is disabled?

SELinux is not namespaced

This means that there is only one SELinux rules base for all containers on a system.  When we attempt to confine containers we want to prevent them from writing to kernel file systems, which might be one mechanism for escape.  One of those file systems would be /proc/fs/selinux, and we also want to control there access to things like /proc/self/attr/* field.

By default Docker processes run as svirt_lxc_net_t and they are prevented from doing (almost) all SELinux operations.  But processes within containers do not know that they are running within a container.  SELinux aware applications are going to attempt to do SELinux operations, especially if they are running as root.

For example,  if you are running yum/dnf/rpm inside of a docker build container and the tools sees that SELinux is enabled, the tool is going to attempt to set labels on the file system, if SELinux blocks the setting of these file labels these calls will fail causing the tool will fail and exit.  Because of it SELinux aware applications within containers would mostly fail.

Libselinux is a liar

We obviously do not want  these apps failing,  so we decided to make libselinux lie to the processes.  libselinux checks if /proc/fs/selinux is mounted onto the system and whether it is mounted read/write.  If /proc/fs/selinux not mounted read/write, libselinux will report to calling applications that SELinux is disabled.  In containers we don't mount these file systems by default or we mount it read/only causing libselinux to report that it is disabled.

# getenforce
Enforcing
# docker run --rm fedora id -Z
id: --context (-Z) works only on an SELinux-enabled kernel
# docker run --rm -v /sys/fs/selinux:/sys/fs/selinux:ro fedora id -Z
id: --context (-Z) works only on an SELinux-enabled kernel
# docker run --rm -v /sys/fs/selinux:/sys/fs/selinux fedora id -Z
system_u:system_r:svirt_lxc_net_t:s0:c196,c525

When SELinux aware applications like yum/dnf/rpm see SELinux is disabled, they stop trying to do SELinux operations, and succeed within containers.

Applications work well even though SELinux is very much enforcing, and controlling their activity.

I believe that SELInux is the best tool we currently use to make Contaieners actually contain.

In this case SELinux disabled does not make me cry.