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Is SE Linux only for Linux?

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Source: etbe - Posted by Bill Keys

Another example of SE Linux access controls on a non-Linux platform is the MAC framework in the TrustedBSD project. This implements SE Linux access controls on top of FreeBSD. From reading the documentation it seems that the amount of changes required to the SE Linux code base for implementation on TrustedBSD was significantly smaller than the changes required for Darwin. I was surprised to see that other Unix based operating systems are porting SELinux for example, the OpenBSD project. Since SELinux is implementing in both kernel space and user space I would think there would be a lot of core changes to SELinux to make it work on other operating systems.

Read this full article at etbe

Comments

No, it's not.

Written by Natalia on 2007-09-06 17:12:31

OpenBSD isn't porting anything from SELinux to it. The TrustedBSD project, a child project of FreeBSD, has gotten permission to port some of the SELinux code to FreeBSD and relicence it BSD so that it can actually be used, but only some of it, and none of that code is actually in the mainline FreeBSD kernel or userland.

OpenBSD has reimplemented some of what the various security projects for Linux do, but it has never gone near mandatory access controls, which developers have spoken derisively about for years now.

buh?

Written by Joshua Brindle on 2007-09-07 10:20:03

@Natalia: No, trustedbsd has not gotten permission to relicense the code under the BSD license. That would require all of the copyright holders (Tresys, Red Hat, TCS, NAI, etc) to consent and they won't (mostly Red Hat won't)

MAC Framework != SELinux

Written by Todd C. Miller on 2007-09-07 10:30:48

The MAC Framework in TrustedBSD plays a similar role to LSM in the Linux kernel. There are several TrustedBSD projects that use different security policy modules utilizing the MAC Framework. One such project is SEBSD, which is a port of the SELinux security components to TrustedBSD using the MAC Framework. Likewise, SEDarwin also utilizes the TrustedBSD MAC Framework, though the MAC Framework won't appear in an official Apple release until Leopard. With the availability of the MAC Framework in Leopard, it should be possible to re-port SEDarwin with fewer invasive changes compared to the port to Tiger.

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