thelinuxlink.net

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1909552,00.asp
"On Tuesday, Novell Inc. announced the creation of the AppArmor project, a new GPL open-source project dedicated to advancing Linux application security.

Novell's AppArmor is an intrusion-prevention system that protects Linux and its applications from the effects of attacks, viruses and malicious applications.

AppArmor is based on technology that Novell acquired from Immunix, a leading provider of Linux host-based application security solutions, when it purchased the company in May 2005."

My hat is off to Novell, good stuff they're doing, and have been doing. When they acquired Ximian they GPL'ed the Ximian Connector plugin, which allowed for the use Microsoft Exchange servers in Evolution, when they acquired SUSE they GPL'ed YaST, and now a few months after they acquired Immunix, they are GPL'ing AppArmor.
I've played with both SELinux and AppArmor, and I gotta say, AppArmor is nice, very nice, easy to configure and is very easy to configure through YaST.

I look forward to see AppArmor in SUSE Linux 10.1

I say kudos to Novell!

I don't get exactly what AppArmor is...is it like a program patch manager or anti-virus or what? They basically just said it would make your computer more secure which is way too general.

CptnObvious999 wrote:I don't get exactly what AppArmor is...is it like a program patch manager or anti-virus or what? They basically just said it would make your computer more secure which is way too general.

I don't know exactly how it works, but AFAIK it's sort of a policy system where you could allow Firefox certain things, and watch closer for buffer overruns and stuff like that, I've been playing with it for a little while and when it's enabled Firefox can't modify it's position as the GNOME default browser, which basicly also prevents it from modifying GNOME and stuff like that, this way it would be much harder to write something that *could* be spyware, even though it's not a problem with Firefox and Linux now, doesn't hurt to put a little more "immunization" in places so that we truly can mock Windows that we NEVER get spyware

From this article and the Novell page it just sounds like it's SELinux. There have been hooks in the kernel for a while to allow advanced security, and that is how SELinux works. It decides what a program can do based on what role it has been assigned. This gives a lot finer control, so programs can even run as root and not be allowed to break things they shouldn't have access to. It's been in Fedora since Core 2.

If it's not SELinux, I'm betting it takes advantage of the same technology in the kernel.

Gomer_X wrote:From this article and the Novell page it just sounds like it's SELinux. There have been hooks in the kernel for a while to allow advanced security, and that is how SELinux works. It decides what a program can do based on what role it has been assigned. This gives a lot finer control, so programs can even run as root and not be allowed to break things they shouldn't have access to. It's been in Fedora since Core 2.

If it's not SELinux, I'm betting it takes advantage of the same technology in the kernel.

I read somewhere, can't find the URL right damn, that it's actually pretty different from SELinux, time do google for some info. Anyway, maybe we should have Pat get some Immunix guys on the show

Sounds like a bunch of chroot jails and a monitoring GUI. Im sure most of the stuff can be done with the builtin priveldge system it just might be more annoying to set up.