Re: SELinux and AppArmor.

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On 6/17/19 4:23 AM, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 4:03 AM Ondrej Mosnacek <omosnace@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 1:59 PM Jason Long <hack3rcon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks, but I meant was can AppArmor cause no Linux distro use SELinux anymore and use AppArmor instead of SELinux?

Why would you want to do that? What benefit would it bring to Fedora?


To be blunt, the poor adoption of SELinux in other distros is largely
because the reference SELinux policy maintained by Tresys doesn't work
at all. I wish Red Hat SELinux engineers would reach out to other
distros and help them transition to our SELinux policy
implementation[1], because it actually _works_.

For example, SUSE supports SELinux and AppArmor, but the
selinux-policy package they have is based on refpolicy, which is
horribly broken. Someone should work with them to migrate to the
fedora-selinux policy.

In Debian, they've been so paralyzed about how to do security in the
first place, they did nothing for over a decade. They have a hard time
making any kind of decision.

Ubuntu had an SELinux expert over a decade ago, but he moved to Google
and wrote the SELinux policies for Chrome OS and Android, as both use
SELinux.

If Red Hat were to help other distros support SELinux using our policy
and our enhanced tools, then the community around SELinux would be
much stronger and there'd be much more usage and upstream support for
it due to the higher exposure.

[1]: https://github.com/fedora-selinux/selinux-policy

I'm certainly in favor of encouraging wider adoption and use of SELinux by other distros, but I'm not sure about your assessment of the root causes of the current lack of support or how to address them.

I haven't looked in a while, but at least at some point, SUSE was in effect just cloning the Fedora SELinux-related packages along with all of their patches. That wasn't really the problem. I think the problem is that SELinux support is not a first class feature of SUSE, isn't part of their QA process, and isn't getting any testing or help from their other developers or users beyond whoever maintains the SELinux-related packages (and maybe not even by that person beyond a token "does it still boot" test). Even if they use Fedora's policy (if they aren't already), they will still need some policy adaptation for their particular distro distinctives and they will still need a developer and user community that is actively testing and maintaining it. The latter is not something Red Hat or others can really provide for them externally; it has to come from within.

With respect to Android, I just wanted to clarify the history there: we created the original Android SELinux reference implementation including policy and userspace bits and got it adopted into Android via the Android Open Source Project [1]. No one from Ubuntu was ever involved to my knowledge. The Android security team did a great job integrating it and then building upon it in every subsequent Android release, but I'm not aware of any connection to Ubuntu. ChromeOS has only gained SELinux support recently as a side effect of adding the Android container support. There is work in progress to expand that support to the rest of ChromeOS but that is also being led by someone previously involved in the Android SELinux integration, not someone from Ubuntu. In any event, the key to the long term viability and success of Android SELinux support is that it is a first class feature (actually a mandatory feature of Android), is part of their standard testing processes, and gets wider testing and help from the entire Android team and ecosystem.

[1] http://selinuxproject.org/page/SEAndroid
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