Re: SELinux and AppArmor.

On 6/17/19 4:23 AM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 4:03 AM Ondrej Mosnacek <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 1:59 PM Jason Long <[email protected]> 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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