Secure doesn’t mean anything
No, seriously. I’m not trying to be ironic because the title of my blog is “Brindle on Security”, which I should probably change to something more creative anyway.
During my tenure at Gentoo, running the Hardened Gentoo project, the most common question by far was “How do I secure my system?” Warning, this article may contain some flamebait, avoid it if you can’t resist flaming back .
Eventually we gave up and just pointed people to websites, perhaps this post can serve as that page. The answer was “What do you mean ’secure’ your system?” Security isn’t, and can’t be, a goal by itself. You need to know what exactly you are trying to protect yourself against, your threat model, as it were.
SELinux has the ability to protect against many different threat models. In Hardened Gentoo we also had some complimentary projects that protected against things that SELinux couldn’t, such as PaX (kernel level memory execution protection and memory layout randomization) and SSP (userspace level stack smashing protection). Fedora also has comparable technologies such as Exec Shield baked in by default.
So I saw a thread recently that said something to the concern of “Why use SELinux, which is security bolted onto Linux when you can use OpenBSD which has security as part of the development process?” It’s an interesting question I suppose, if you can decode it. The OpenBSD mantra seems to be develop software correctly in the first place and you don’t need additional layers of security. The baffling part is that you’ll rarely find an OpenBSD user that actually knows what security OpenBSD actually, tangibly provides.
All that said, there are different kinds of security that you might want to implement, and lots of different solutions to attain them.
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