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Information Flow Query and Verification for Security Policy of Security-Enhanced Linux

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Advances in Information and Computer Security (IWSEC 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 4266))

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Abstract

This paper presents a Colored Petri Nets (CPN) approach to analyze the information flow in the policy file of Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). The SELinux access control decisions are based on a security policy file that contains several thousands of security rules. It becomes a challenge for policy administrator to determine whether the modification of the security policy file conforms to the pre-specified security goals. To address this issue, this paper proposes a formal information flow model for SELinux security policy file, and presents a simple query language to help administrators to express the expected/unexpected information flow. We developed a method to transform the SELinux policy and security goal into Policy CPN Diagram and Query CPN Diagram. A tool named SEAnalyzer that can automatically verify the SELinux policy has been developed and two application examples of this tool will be presented in the context.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Chen, YM., Kao, YW. (2006). Information Flow Query and Verification for Security Policy of Security-Enhanced Linux. In: Yoshiura, H., Sakurai, K., Rannenberg, K., Murayama, Y., Kawamura, S. (eds) Advances in Information and Computer Security. IWSEC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4266. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11908739_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11908739_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-47699-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47700-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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