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SELinux: any NSA backdoors?

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magellan

Member
Joined
Jul 20, 2002
I remember people were suspicious of SELinux when it was first released by the NSA, but now, after revelations that the NSA is indeed spying on innocent US citizens w/o cause of warrant, I have to wonder how trustworthy SELinux really is. I know the PRC, where Red Flag Linux is king, don't use SELinux.

I posted this same question once to the CentOS forum and it was instantly deleted and no reason was given.
 
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The NSA no longer has any involvement, SELinux was GPL'd and the code has been available for scrutiny by the open source community for 13 years.
 
The NSA no longer has any involvement, SELinux was GPL'd and the code has been available for scrutiny by the open source community for 13 years.

That sounds like good news. Thanks for the info.
 
I remember people were suspicious of SELinux when it was first released by the NSA, but now, after revelations that the NSA is indeed spying on innocent US citizens w/o cause of warrant, I have to wonder how trustworthy SELinux really is. I know the PRC, where Red Flag Linux is king, don't use SELinux.

I posted this same question once to the CentOS forum and it was instantly deleted and no reason was given.

I'm not surprised by CentOS forum's handling, it's just their style of moderating a forum that gets the type of traffic that they do.

Red Flag Linux may not come with SELinux as an included package by default, but adding a Rednat, CentOS or Fedora repository would enable one to install SELinux in Red Flag Linux if they wished to.

Here is an interesting article comparing SELinux with AppArmor- http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/selinux-vs-apparmor-vs-grsecurity.html

According to several articles hit in google search , AppArmor seemed to be preferred over SELinux, due to ease of use, and it's admin tools available.
 
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