Hello, and welcome to this Pluralsight presentation.
My name is Andrew Mallett,
and I'm going to be your instructor to help guide you through the module,
Working with AppArmor.
As we work our way through this module,
we'll be understanding a little bit more about what AppArmor is
and what we mean by application security.
We'll be installing our AppArmor utilities to make sure
that we've both got AppArmor installed,
as well as the tools that we need to manage it.
Having installed the tools though, we won't have any profiles.
Profiles are predefined lists of instructions of what an application,
or program, is allowed to do.
We'll take a look at how we protect services,
so we can look at installing services that are managed by profiles,
and see how we can see then that our profiles become active.
We can create our own profiles.
This is going to be especially important if we create our own applications.
We can control precisely what the application is allowed to do,
so if anybody breaks into our system and misconfigures our application,
then it still will only be able to do what it's allowed to do.
So importantly,
we're going to look at how we create our own profiles
to protect our own applications.
Now AppArmor, like SELinux, is a mandatory access control list.
It's an application security system that is promoted primarily by SUSE.
We'll be running our demonstrations on the openSUSE system.
It works at the Linux kernel level with the LSM, the Linux Security Module.
And similarly to SELinux,
it protects all processes even if they are running as root.
So it's not something that root can bypass.
Again, we'll be running as root,
and we can see that we can prevent us doing things on the system as a root user,
as well as protecting other events.
If you're using an Enterprise product,
you might find that it's already installed and up and running for you.
But maybe we have to go in and make the additional steps
to install our AppArmor utilities.
Just make sure that AppArmor is installed and you've got the
minimum toolset that you need to manage it.
One of those tools is the aa‑status.
So it gives me a quick look at the profiles that we have on the
system and how many of them are in different states.
We don't have any profiles,
so we can additionally go in and install our profiles.
And of course, after installing the profiles,
we'll go back and we'll be able to see those with aa‑status.
Now at this stage you know what I'm going to say,
the best way to learn is to go out and do something.
Now make sure that you've got a system that can support AppArmor. We'll be working on our openSUSE 15.2 system.