[Question] How enforcing and permissive differ on start-up

[Shintaro Fujiwara]

Hi, I have a question on differences between permissve and enforcing.

I installed courier-imap from source (as always), and configured
courier.te, courier.fc just to apply installation-path to souece installation.

There are two say, daemons, courier_$1_t, i.e. courier_authdaemon_t,
and I had to declair
domain_auto_trans(initrc_t, courier_exec_t, courier_t)
(courier_t was not declared in courier.te, so I did)
as I declared starting script in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

I set selinux enforcing and found that courier_authdaemon_t started all-right,
but courier_t not.
When I set selinux permissive, it started all-right.

How should I fix this problem ?

Thanks in advance !

[Stephen Smalley]

On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 22:47 +0900, Shintaro Fujiwara wrote:
> Hi, I have a question on differences between permissve and enforcing.
>
> I installed courier-imap from source (as always), and configured
> courier.te, courier.fc just to apply installation-path to souece installation.
>
> There are two say, daemons, courier_$1_t, i.e. courier_authdaemon_t,
> and I had to declair
> domain_auto_trans(initrc_t, courier_exec_t, courier_t)
> (courier_t was not declared in courier.te, so I did)
> as I declared starting script in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
>
> I set selinux enforcing and found that courier_authdaemon_t started all-right,
> but courier_t not.
> When I set selinux permissive, it started all-right.
>
> How should I fix this problem ?

Just to clarify, there is a difference between permissive and enforcing
with regard to type transitions.  In permissive, if the type transition
would yield an invalid context (e.g. role is not authorized for the new
type), it nonetheless is allowed to proceed, whereas in enforcing mode,
it fails.

[Shintaro Fujiwara]

2007/12/10, Stephen Smalley :
> On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 22:47 +0900, Shintaro Fujiwara wrote:
> > Hi, I have a question on differences between permissve and enforcing.
> >
> > I installed courier-imap from source (as always), and configured
> > courier.te, courier.fc just to apply installation-path to souece installation.
> >
> > There are two say, daemons, courier_$1_t, i.e. courier_authdaemon_t,
> > and I had to declair
> > domain_auto_trans(initrc_t, courier_exec_t, courier_t)
> > (courier_t was not declared in courier.te, so I did)
> > as I declared starting script in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
> >
> > I set selinux enforcing and found that courier_authdaemon_t started all-right,
> > but courier_t not.
> > When I set selinux permissive, it started all-right.
> >
> > How should I fix this problem ?
>
> Just to clarify, there is a difference between permissive and enforcing
> with regard to type transitions.  In permissive, if the type transition
> would yield an invalid context (e.g. role is not authorized for the new
> type), it nonetheless is allowed to proceed, whereas in enforcing mode,
> it fails.

I had a same kind of problem on cron in F6.
I solved it somehow at the time, though.
Now I'm trying to configure bind and it does not start up even in permissive.
I think something is wrong with the application itself?
I will ask again if I have a question on SELinux related matters.
Thanks !
> --
> Stephen Smalley
> National Security Agency