invasive vs inconvenient security

The recent news from the UK gives us an example of invasive security. Preventing passengers carrying on any hand luggage (even wallets) and frisking all of them is the type of treatment you expect for criminals and visitors to maximum security prisons. It's not what you expect for people who are involved in routine (or what used to be routine) travel.

The security measures offered by SE Linux are sometimes described as invasive. I don't believe that this is an accurate description. I admit that sometimes minor tweaks are required (such as setting the correct context of a file). But for most users (corporate users and typical home users) the distribution takes care of all this for them. A default Fedora install should just work for the typical home user and a default Red Hat Enterprise Linux install should just work for the corporate user.

The main reason that it's so easy to use is that the default domain for user sessions and for daemons that are not specifically configured in the security policy is unconfined_t. This means that programs for which there is no policy and programs run from a user session do not have SE Linux access controls. The default configuration of SE Linux only restricts programs that are known to be at risk.

The most common case of SE Linux access controls causing inconvenience is the policy for Apache (the daemon with the most configuration options). There are a set of configuration options (known as booleans) that can be used to determine what aspects of Apache will be confined, generally it only takes a few minutes to determine and specify the correct settings to support the desired operation.

Next time you are being frisked at a UK or US airport and are facing the prospect of a long flight with books and all other forms of entertainment banned keep in mind that airlines have invasive security and should be avoided if possible. SE Linux offers security that is at most a minor inconvenience (usually not even noticed) and should be embraced.