8 min read

For years I have been just a passive users of SELinux, in the early days using it in Fedora, I would disable it because there were too many applications that didn’t work with it, I knew it was wrong, but didn’t have the knowledge nor the time to really look into the right way to deal with it.

Over the years Fedora added a huge number of policies to the point that 99% of the apps I use work just fine with SELinux enabled, and whenever I would get one of those denied warnings, I just followed the wizard-like-troubleshooting to update a policy and move on.

ausearch -c '<some name here>' --raw | audit2allow -M <name-here-too> semodule -i <custom-policy-name-here>.pp

I only run into those few cases when I would move an install of my database to a separate partition, at the time I figure it was an easy fix, but about a month or two ago I learned there was a better way.

SELinux policies, labels and custom types.

The time came that I needed to write a custom SELinux policy for an app that I was working on. And I didn’t want to just use the shortcut of using audit2allow , I wanted to do it right.

I searched high and low gathering information on how to do this, most of what I found was targeted to administrators who did things like moving nginx to a non standard location. But in my case I needed to write a new set of rules for my new program.

I was about to give up when I decided to post this question: how to create a custom SELinux label.

At that point I thought what I needed was a custom label, later on I learned I needed a custom type. And of course, after posting the question, I couldn’t just sit and wait, so I kept on searching for the answer and eventually I found it.

Requirements of my Go application.

Mr Wilson, the project I’m working on, is a simple http(s) service. The key features that SELinux cares about are:

Listens on port 443, 80 and 1212 on dev mode Reads/Writes a file on $HOME Uses dns to lookup hosts Reads/Writes files to its own location, by default, /srv/bot

Writing the actual policy.

You can get many of the permissions your app needs by running:

sepolgen --init /path/to/binary

That command will generate these files:

app.fc app.sh app.if app.spec app.te

Unless you are creating an rpm, you can delete app.spec and app.sh .

Let’s start with the app.te file:

policy_module(mrwilson, 1.0.0) ######################################## # # Declarations # type mrwilson_t; type mrwilson_exec_t; init_daemon_domain(mrwilson_t, mrwilson_exec_t) # Please remove this once your policy works as expected. permissive mrwilson_t; ######################################## # # mrwilson local policy # allow mrwilson_t self:fifo_file rw_fifo_file_perms; allow mrwilson_t self:unix_stream_socket create_stream_socket_perms; domain_use_interactive_fds(mrwilson_t) files_read_etc_files(mrwilson_t) auth_use_nsswitch(mrwilson_t) miscfiles_read_localization(mrwilson_t) sysnet_dns_name_resolve(mrwilson_t)

Details of the Type Enforcement file.

policy_module(mrwilson, 1.0.0)

This uses the name of the binary, which will be the name of the policy too, and a version.

type mrwilson_t; type mrwilson_exec_t; init_daemon_domain(mrwilson_t, mrwilson_exec_t)

Here we defined the types mrwilson_t and mrwilson_exec_t , you can think of these as contexts that your application/daemon or service is allowed to work within.

mrwilson_exec_t tells SELinux that we’ll be executing this file.

tells SELinux that we’ll be this file. mrwilson_t is the unique type to describe this application.

is the unique type to describe this application. init_daemon_domain is a macro that among other things, tells SELinux that this program will run as a service (using systemd in my case).

permissive mrwilson_t;

This line tells SELinux to log permission errors, but let the application continue to run. When I originally worked with my program to find all the permissions it needed, I went the long way and removed this line from the start, so my application kept failing to run each time I run it, up to you which way you prefer. Regardless, remember to remove this line when you are done.

files_read_etc_files(mrwilson_t) miscfiles_read_localization

I actually removed these two lines from my policy, because my app does not need to read anything from /etc and doesn’t have any localization code.

sysnet_dns_name_resolve(mrwilson_t)

I do need to connect to DNS servers so I left this one in.

Adding rules to your Type Enforcement file.

This gave me a good starting point, but I still needed to add lots of rules that are specific to my go application.

I originally said I would run this program from /srv/bot , and because I was going to store files in there, I wanted to have a file context that was just for my app, instead of using the generic file_var_t .

So right under init_daemon_domain , I added:

type mrwilson_var_t; files_type(mrwilson_var_t)

files_type takes the type we defined and makes it a file context, which is what we need.

Assigning file contexts.

When you write a policy, you can tell SELinux where you expect to store/read files from, and you can tell it which context each path is supposed to have.

This is done using the app.fc file.

The default app.fc has one line:

/path/to/binary -- gen_context(system_u:object_r:mrwilson_exec_t,s0)

You need to update the path to match the path your executable file will have once deployed.

I also wanted to give /srv/bot the mrwilson_var_t context instead of the default file_var_t :

/srv/bot/mrwilson -- gen_context(system_u:object_r:mrwilson_exec_t,s0) /srv/bot(/.*)? gen_context(system_u:object_r:mrwilson_var_t,s0)

Notice the -- on the first line? Those two dashes made me waste about 3 hours because I just assumed they were needed on all lines, and it kept messing with me when I used them on the second line. Turns out -- means: apply this rule to files only, no directories. If you need to apply a rule just to a directory but not to a file that is matched by the regex, you can use -d

Trial and error.

The way I have learned most things related to programming/computers/etc has been trial and error, and SELinux wasn’t an exception. At this point I had a basic type enforcement file and a file context so I felt ready to deploy it and see what happens.

You run:

make -f /usr/share/selinux/devel/Makefile

and this will generate a .pp file, you can then copy this file to your server and there run:

sudo semodule -i app.pp

This will load the new policy and allow your app to execute the commands described in the .te file. Now I needed to relabel the /srv/bot folder based on the new policy, you do this by running:

restorecon -R -v /srv/bot

You can verify the new file context by running:

$ ls -Z /srv system_u:object_r:mrwilson_var_t:s0 bot

It worked! and if you created a file inside the bot directory, it will also have the mrwilson_var_t context:

$ ls -Z /srv/bot system_u:object_r:mrwilson_var_t:s0 2.log

Time to start the application using systemctl:

sudo systemctl start mrwilson; sleep 1; sudo systemctl stop mrwilson;

on another terminal:

journalctl -ef

I start my app, wait 1 second, and then stop it, why? because I knew it would generate some denied errors, it would fail, but systemd would try to start it again, so I wanted to reduce the number of log lines I needed to read.

And here starts the loop, to find out what privilege is still needed, run:

ausearch -m avc -ts 02:59:59 | audit2allow -m mrwilson

-ts 02:59:59 tells ausearch to only look after this timestamp, very useful in our case.

tells to only look after this timestamp, very useful in our case. audit2allow -m mrwilson generates a new .te (type enforcement) file for us, read it and add the new instructions from the file to your main app.te file.

Once you update your type enforcement file, you call make again, upload it, run sudo semodule -i app.pp , start, wait, stop your app and see what else your app needs.

Depending on the size of your app, this could take a while, but if you are a glass half full kind of person, this will give you a huge insight into the inner workings of your app, which I personally find fascinating :).

The final type enforcement file.

For mrwilson, the full file is:

policy_module(mrwilson, 1.0.0) ######################################## # # Declarations # type mrwilson_t; type mrwilson_exec_t; init_daemon_domain(mrwilson_t, mrwilson_exec_t) type mrwilson_var_t; #make mrwilson_var_t a file context files_type(mrwilson_var_t) require { type user_home_t; type init_t; type user_home_dir_t; type sysctl_net_t; type unreserved_port_t; type http_port_t; class dir { add_name remove_name search write getattr }; class file { create execute open read rename write unlink append getattr }; class tcp_socket { accept listen name_bind name_connect }; class capability net_bind_service; } ### Manually added allow mrwilson_t mrwilson_var_t:dir { add_name remove_name write search getattr}; allow mrwilson_t mrwilson_var_t:file { unlink create open rename write read append getattr }; allow mrwilson_t user_home_dir_t:dir search; allow mrwilson_t user_home_t:file { open read write}; allow mrwilson_t self:capability net_bind_service; allow mrwilson_t sysctl_net_t:dir search; allow mrwilson_t sysctl_net_t:file { read open }; allow mrwilson_t http_port_t:tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect }; allow mrwilson_t unreserved_port_t:tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect }; allow mrwilson_t self:tcp_socket { listen accept }; ######################################## allow mrwilson_t self:fifo_file rw_fifo_file_perms; allow mrwilson_t self:unix_stream_socket create_stream_socket_perms; domain_use_interactive_fds(mrwilson_t) auth_use_nsswitch(mrwilson_t) miscfiles_read_localization(mrwilson_t) sysnet_dns_name_resolve(mrwilson_t)

Code

The files related to SElinux for my project are on github, here (They have the j2 extension because I use ansible to provision the server, configure and deploy my app and all the requirements).

Conclusion.

While writing a policy not knowing all the requirements of your Go application is time consuming, I believe that it is completely worth your time. By doing this we are assuring our users that if anyone finds a way to make our application misbehave, the damage will be contained to a minimum. My app isn’t allowed to read or write outside /srv/bot or the user that runs the daemon’s home directory (in my case it is a dedicated user that isn’t even in the wheel user group).

Oh, and I know this isn’t just for Go applications, this guide should work for any kind of application, I just happen to be working on Go :) .

You can find how I compile the separate files into a pp module by going here

I hope you find this useful.