Research Assignment
Linux Security Technologies
Kristy Graves
ITT Tech – Dayton
Linux II
IT302

Mandatory Access Control Mandatory Access Control (MAC) is a system wide policy that relies on the current system to control access (Syracuse University, 2009). Users cannot alter or make any changes to this policy. Only the administrator has the clearance and authorization to make changes (The Computer Language Company Inc., 2012). Mandatory access control mechanisms are more than Discretionary Access Control (DAC) but have trade offs in performance and convenience to all users (The Open Web Application Security Project, 2002). Users can access lower level documentation, but they cannot access higher level without the process of declassification. Access is authorized or restricted based on the security characteristics of the HTTP client. This can be due to SSL bit length, version information, originating IP address or domain, etc. Systems supporting flexible security models can be SELinux, Trusted Solaris, TrustedBSD, etc. DAC checks the validity of the credentials given by the user. MAC validate aspects which are out of the hands of the user (Coar, 2000). If there is no DAC list on an object, full access is granted to any user (Microsoft, 2012).
SELinux
SELinux has three states of operation. These states are enforcing, permissive, and disabled. SELinux was developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and implements MAC in a Linux kernel (Sobell, 2011). Enforcing is the default state for Linux. This is enforcing the security policies. No programs or users are able to do anything not permitted by the security policies. System is somewhat degraded in performance in this state. Permissibe mode is the diagnostic state. SELinux sends warning messages to log file and does not enforce the security policy. This is useful for debugging and troubleshooting