[arch-general] Revisit official SELinux support

[Nicolás de la Torre]

The first answer that i can think is the patches needed on many packages to
support selinux. Is not only that you have to enable a config on the
kernel, you have to maintain the patches on for the each of the packages,
and that maybe will hold you from keeping things KISS and following
upstream.

Thanks


2013/10/28 Karol Babioch <karol at babioch.de>

> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering whether there was ever an actual discussion regarding the
> SELinux support within Arch. I could only find a bug report from
> September 2012 (see [1]), which was closed by Dave Reisner with kind of
> a lame comment: "A million times no.".
>
> After having dealt with SELinux on a couple of occasions I think that it
> is real security enhancement worth the initial hassle of setting it up
> properly (at least in a server environment).
>
> Looking into the support for SELinux in Arch I think it is way too messy
> to be actually used in practice (see [2]).
>
> I wouldn't go so far to suggest to enable SELinux by default as proposed
> in the bug report mentioned above, but I think it would actually make
> sense to support it - more or less - officially. I'm thinking about a
> model similar to the one implemented by Debian (see [3]). It basically
> comes down to installing some default policies and enabling SELinux by
> running a script.
>
> This would, however, require at least the stock kernel to have support
> for SELinux built-in by default. Are there any technical reasons for
> this not being the case already?
>
> I don't want this to become a discussion about the pros and cons of
> SELinux (on a desktop system) in general. I'm just wondering whether it
> would be feasible to implement "official" support for SELinux within
> Arch. So, if possible, please keep it technical.
>
> Best regards,
> Karol Babioch
>
> [1]: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31448
> [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SELinux
> [3]: https://wiki.debian.org/SELinux/Setup
>
>