The SELinux Reference Policy project (refpolicy) is creating a complete SELinux policy as an alternative to the existing strict and targeted policies available from http://selinux.sf.net. Once complete, this policy will be able to be used as the system policy for a variety of systems and used as the basis for creating other policies. Refpolicy is based on the current strict and targeted policies, but aims to accomplish many additional goals.
Refpolicy is under active development, with support and full time development staff from Tresys Technology. The first release is available from the download page. This release is far from complete and is not usable as a drop in replacement for the existing policies. It is for interested policy developers and community members to examine and comment upon. The status page has more details on what is included in the current release. This project is just getting started and we are looking for policy developers interested in contributing.
Security is the reason for existence for SELinux policies and must, therefore, always be the first priority. The common view of security as a binary state (secure or not secure) is not a sufficient goal for developing an SELinux policy. In reality, different systems have different requirements and purposes and corresponding differences in the meaning of secure. What is a fundamental security flaw on one system might be the acceptable, or even the primary functionality, of another. The challenge for a system policies like the current strict and targeted policy or refpolicy is to support as many of these differring security goals as is practical. To accomplish this refpolicy will provide:
The difficulty and complexity of creating SELinux policies has become the number one barrier to the adoption of SELinux. It also potentially reduces the security of the policies: a policy that is too complex to easily understand is difficult to make secure. Refpolicy aims to make aggressive improvements in this area, making policies easier to develop, understand, and analyze. This will be addressed through improved structuring and organization, the addition of modularity and abstraction, and documentation. See getting started and documentation for more information.
Refpolicy aims to support a variety of policy configurations and formats, including standard source policies, MLS policies, and loadable policy modules all from the same source tree. This is done through the addition of infrastructure for automatically handling the differences between source and loadable module based policies and the additional MLS fields to all policy statements that include contexts.
| Reference Policy Roadmap | ||
|---|---|---|
| Version | Date | Description |
| 0.1 | June 2005 | Initial public release, basic policy restructuring, some infrastructure, few modules, and minimal documentation. |
| 0.2 | July 2005 | Restructuring complete, additional modules, and improved infrastructure. |
| 0.3 | August 2005 | Additional modules, documentation, basic role infrastructure, and tested loadable module support. |
| 0.4 | September 2005 | Additional modules, documentation, and complete role infrastructure including true role separation. |
| 0.5 | October 2005 | Additional modules, documentation, targeted policy, and tested MLS support |
| 0.6 | December 2005 | Additional modules, documentation, and module variations |