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AppArmor or SELinux?



Hello,

I am running Testing/Sid amd64 with Multi-Arch enabled (i. e. Acrobat
Reader and Skype from i386) on a single-user machine and here’s what
I want to achieve:

- Programs that process data ‘from the internet’ are only allowed to
  access the files they strictly need to access, plus a $HOME/Desktop
  (to share files with other such processes etc.)
- The same restrictions apply to childs of these processes
- All other processes are allowed to do whatever their standard Unix
  permissions allow them to do.

In the past, I achieved this via AppArmor and custom profiles for
Pidgin, Opera, Iceweasel and Skype[1,2]. However, I just noticed that
there don’t appear AppArmor profiles to be around for Kernel 3.3 or
3.4, and, aside from that, only Ubuntu appears to use it, while
SELinux is much more common. A bit more reading in the Debian
Handbook then illustrated that SELinux is apparently more powerful
but also more complex than AppArmor.

My question is: Would it make sense to deploy SELinux on my system to
achieve the tasks mentioned above?

I know that security cannot be absolute, but I would feel much more
comfortable if an exploit in the MSN handler of Pidgin or a plugin
gone wild in Opera wouldn’t make my private SSH keys accessible to
the world :-)

Best regards & many thanks,

Claudius

[1] Not Claws Mail because it needs to read my mail anyways and
there’s little that needs more protection on my computer than my mail.
[2] Writing these profiles was relatively straight-forward,
especially since I didn’t care about stuff outside of /home and /tmp.

-- 
Never trust a child farther than you can throw it.
http://chubig.net                          telnet nightfall.org 4242

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