SELinux/Tutorials/Permissive versus enforcing

Permissive versus enforcing
An SELinux-hardened system will run with SELinux in enforcing mode, meaning that the SELinux policy is in effect and things that it doesn't want to allow won't be allowed. But when trying to debug permission problems, it might make sense to temporarily disable SELinux. In this case, you can opt to have SELinux run in permissive mode, either for the entire system, or for a specific (set of) types.

Switching between enforcing and permissive
The purpose of supporting permissive policies is to allow a system to run with SELinux enabled, while still allowing all accesses that the applications are trying to do. An SELinux-enabled system that runs in permissive mode is not protected by SELinux. The true purpose is that it still logs what it would have denied and as such allows the administrator to get a sense of what would happen if he switches the system from permissive to enforcing mode.

Switching between enforcing and permissive mode is possible if the kernel you have booted supports SELinux Development mode (CONFIG_SECURITY_SELINUX_DEVELOP=y). Otherwise, the kernel automatically boots in enforcing mode and you are not able to switch back. Although such kernels are sometimes considered the safest (as a successful intrusion still doesn't allow the attacker to disable SELinux, even if he obtains full administrative access) most distributions keep development mode on. After all, once you have full administrative access, you can rebuild policies and add in the privileges you need anyhow. And even kernels with development mode on can still be hardened - there is a secure_mode_policyload boolean that disables switching to permissive mode until you reboot the system.

To get information about the current state, you can use getenforce or sestatus.

Using the setenforce command
To switch from enforcing to permissive and back, you can use the setenforce command. This command supports Enforcing, Permissive, 1 or 0 as argument.

The use of the setenforce command is useful to temporarily switch from or to enforcing mode. For instance, if your system boots up in permissive and you think the system is ready to run in enforcing mode after it has been booted, you can use setenforce 1 after booting to enable enforcing mode.

The selinux configuration file
The default value (enforcing or permissive) when the system boots is defined in the file, through the SELINUX parameter.

In the above example, the system boots in enforcing mode by default.

Using the enforcing kernel boot parameter
Another method to define how to boot is using the enforcing= boot parameter. This parameter overrides the setting in the configuration file, so even with SELINUX=enforcing set, if you boot with enforcing=0 then the system will boot in SELinux permissive mode.

Differences in application behavior
When we said that running in permissive mode has the system run as if SELinux was not enabled, we weren't really lying... well, perhaps a bit.

There is the matter of SELinux-aware applications. These are applications that know about SELinux on a system, and behave differently when SELinux is enabled or not. Most of these applications however do not change their behavior based on the permissive or enforcing mode - only if SELinux is truly disabled. But that does mean that running your system in permissive might still have applications behave as if SELinux was in enforcing mode, or at least behave differently than when SELinux is disabled.

SELinux-aware applications are usually linked with the library, which can be checked with ldd.

cron is an SELinux-aware application and so even when in permissive mode, you may experience An example of a SELinux-related failures if something has been mis-configured (usually, that means inappropriate labeling). See for example SELinux FAQ: Cron entrypoint failed.

Marking one type as permissive
The previous sections all used full switching - either the system is running in enforcing, or the system is running in permissive.

Luckily, SELinux has a neat feature where you can tell it one particular domain should be permissive whereas the rest runs in enforcing mode. All you need to do is tell semanage what domain you want to put in permissive mode.

You can get an overview of the current permissive domains as well, using semanage permissive -l.

Completely disabling SELinux
If you need to disable SELinux completely, there are two options: either update the configuration file, or use the boot parameter.

However, before proceeding with this, it is important that you understand what the consequences are: disabling SELinux also disables the generation of contexts. That means that every file created or modified (if modification is done using a replacement operation, like vim does by default) will not get an SELinux context anymore. If you then boot back with SELinux enabled, SELinux will refuse to load/read in those files (they will get the default_t context assigned - not through extended attributes, just default behavior - that not many domains can read or work with).

As a consequence, when you have booted a system with SELinux disabled, you need to do a full file system relabel again when booting with SELinux enabled, and you'll probably need to do so in permissive mode. Afterwards, you can reboot back in enforcing mode.

Disabling through the boot parameter
If CONFIG_SELINUX_BOOTPARAM is enabled in the kernel, then you can boot with SELinux disabled using selinux=0 as boot parameter.

Disabling through the configuration file
If you want to boot with SELinux disabled without boot parameter, you can edit and set the SELINUX parameter to disabled.

What you need to remember
What you should remember from this tutorial is that
 * SELinux has two "modes" of operation: permissive and enforcing
 * in permissive mode SELinux does not enforce its policy, but only logs what it would have blocked (or granted)
 * applications that are SELinux-aware might still behave differently with permissive mode than when SELinux is completely disabled
 * specific types can be marked as permissive while the rest of the system is in enforcing mode
 * completely disabling SELinux has consequences on the file contexts so an entire system relabeling is needed afterwards