From: guido@trentalancia.com (Guido Trentalancia)
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:31:19 +0100
Subject: [refpolicy] Question: and the policy grows...
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On Fri, 18/03/2011 at 07.06 +0100, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 07:08:45PM -0400, Mark Montague wrote:
> > However, I strongly disagree that this forces organizations to 
> > understand what SELinux does or is supposed to do:  In all of the 
> > organizations in which I am personally involved (which includes a major 
> > research University), all of the system administrators I have met 
> > disable SELinux as the very first thing they do after installing the 
> > OS.  Most of them disable SELinux without having any real understanding 
> > of what it does, and the reason they give, when asked, is because they 
> > want everything to "just work".  When an AVC denial occurs, they don't 
> > even want to know what it means or why it occurs, the just know that 
> > "the AVC denial breaks their service" and disabling SELinux "fixes their 
> > service".
> 
> True, but this is not because security (or SELinux) is boring, it is because
> it is considered hard (an expert field).

No, not necessarily, at least in my experience and I am going to explain
why. There are close relatives and close friends of mine that are
professionals (store large amount of sensitive details of customers and
other sensitive and important information) and that when offered
security advice for free on a Sunday afternoon refused it with arguments
similar to the one that I already mentioned for preventive medicine.
This is a general issue with computer security, as the above does not
necessarily refer to Linux.

> I hope that the amount of organizations that disable SELinux on first sight
> shrinks every day. In the organization I work, they considered SELinux
> during the intake of Linux and decided to continue with it, seeing that it
> is easier to disable it in exceptional circumstances than enable it in
> exceptional circumstances (think DMZ or other).

But once again discussing this is outside of the scope of my original
message. Russel Coker has opened a new thread on that on the SELinux
mailing list.

Regards,

Guido