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<h1>Project Overview</h1>
<p>
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The SELinux Reference Policy project (refpolicy) is creating a complete SELinux
policy as an alternative to the existing strict and targeted policies available
from <a href="http://selinux.sf.net">http://selinux.sf.net</a>. 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.
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</p>
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<br/>
<p>
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Refpolicy is under active development, with support and full time development
staff from <a href="http://www.tresys.com/selinux">Tresys Technology</a>. The
current release is available from the <a href="index.php?page=download">download</a>
page. The <a href="index.php?page=status">status</a> page has more details on
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what is included in the current release.
</p>
<br/>
<p>
The project is always looking for policy developers interested in <a href="index.php?page=contributing">contributing</a>.
See the <a href="index.php?page=getting-started">getting started</a> guide for
more information on writing Refpolicy modules.
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</p>
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<br>
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<h1>Project Goals</h1>
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<p>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:
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</p>
<ul>
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<li><b>Strong Modularity:</b> central to the design of the policy is
strict modularity. Access to resources are abstracted, and
implementation details are encapsulated in the module.
</li>
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<li><b>Security Goals:</b> clearly stated security goals will for each
component of the policy. This will allow policy developers to
determine if a given component meets their security needs.
</li>
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<li><b>Documentation</b>: 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 will make
aggressive improvements in this area by including documentation
for modules and their interfaces as a critical part of the
infrastructure. See the <a href="index.php?page=documentation">documentation</a>
page for more information.
</li>
<li><b>Development Tool Support</b>: In addition to documentation,
Refpolicy aims to make improvements in this area, making
policies easier to develop, understand, analyze, and verify by adding
interface call backtraces which can be used for debugging and
graphical development tools.
</li>
<li><b>Forward Looking:</b> Refpolicy aims to support a variety of
policy configurations and formats, including standard source
policies, MLS policies, and <a href="http://sepolicy-server.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=modules">loadable policy modules</a>
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.
</li>
<li><b>Configurability:</b> configuration tools that allow the
policy developer to make important security decisions including
defining roles, configuring networking, and trading legacy
compatibility for increased security.
</li>
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<li><b>Flexible Base Policy:</b> a base policy that protects the basic
operating system and serves as a foundation to the rest of the
policy. This base policy should be able to support a variety of
application policies with differing security goals.
</li>
<li><b>Application Policy Variations:</b> application policy variations
that make different security tradeoffs. For example, two Apache
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policies might be created, one that is for serving read-only
static content that is severely restricted, and another that is
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appropriate for dynamic content.
</li>
<li><b>Multi-Level Security</b>: MLS will be supported out-of-the-box
without requiring destructive changes to the policy. It will be
possible to compile and MLS and non-MLS policy from the same
policy files by switching a configuration option.
</li>
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</ul>