On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Daniel J Walsh dwalsh@redhat.com wrote:
That is not the way it works. SELinux Reference policy is a database of rules that govern the default ways application run.
Yes, but it is application developers that know what their applications need to do. Is there a way for them to express that?
These rules that have been written for Fedora/RHEL are public and are being moved upstream.
There has to be a better approach than letting the Fedora guys second-guess where application components should live, then second-guess what the application needs to do. In fact, that sounds like a recipe for years of problems for everyone who uses the results.
Different Distributions can choose to use these policies or write there own.
So after the Fedora version of second-guessing, that gets pushed off to other distributions to likely make it even worse?
Out of the Reference Policy you can build your own version of targeted or MLS policy or you can write your policy from scratch.
But is there a way that these can originate from the group that manages the application, and appear automatically as a result in distributions that include the application or if you compile from the source distribution?
The place that SELinux breaks applications is when an application does something that SELinux did not expect.
Well, of course. The issue is how SELinux is supposed to learn from the person who does know what the application is going to do. I don't run an OS distribution to what a distribution does, I run it so it does what the application is supposed to do. That is, the application is the point, not what SELinux guesses it was supposed to do.
I wrote a paper and presentation on the four main causes of SELinux issues.
http://people.fedoraproject.org/~dwalsh/SELinux/Presentations/selinux_four_t...
Don't these all boil done to SELinux not understanding the application's needs?