I got my hands on a copy of Sven’s SELinux book so after reading it I think it’s a good idea to write a review on it.
The version I got was an ebook in PDF format. Despite I didn’t have any problems to open it with my favourite mobile APP, the ebook is formatted as a book with wide margins which made reading it on a mobile screen a bit uncomfortable.
The book started with some publisher’s information and jumped into how the Discretionary Access Control systems in Linux work and then slowly but steadily introduced more complex matters around the SELinux internals and how permissions work with it.
After reading the first chapter you have a nice insight on what are the main elements of SELinux and how they work, the second gets hands on work by explaining you how to enable or disable SELinux how applications talk with it and how to read denials, the third focuses on handling user identification, the fourth on file accesses and the fifth on network access. To wrap it up the sixth explains how to modify or build policies to suit your custom needs.
The whole book offers a really nice and smooth ride through the whole system introducing the concepts slowly but steadily so even the less experienced user can understand them, it also provides plenty of real life examples which the user can try to help reinforce the learned concepts.
In general the book is very nicely written but would have benefited from a review as it has a few errata, also the format was not the best for ebooks but I think in general it’s worth a read if you are interested on SELinux as it will provide a good insight on the whole system.