This section provides a very basic understanding of what is happening “behind the scenes” (and under the hood of the YaST interface) when you run AppArmor.

An AppArmor profile is a plain text file containing path entries and access permissions. See Section 20.1, “Breaking a Novell AppArmor Profile into Its Parts” for a detailed reference profile. The directives contained in this text file are then enforced by the AppArmor routines to quarantine the process or program.

The following tools interact in the building and enforcement of AppArmor profiles and policies:

Once a profile has been built and is loaded, there are two ways in which it can get processed:

Now that you have familiarized yourself with AppArmor, start selecting the applications for which to build profiles. Programs that need profiling are those that mediate privilege. The following programs have access to resources that the person using the program does not have, so they grant the privilege to the user when used:

Conversely, unprivileged programs do not need to be profiled. For instance, a shell script might invoke the cp program to copy a file. Because cp does not have its own profile, it inherits the profile of the parent shell script, so can copy any files that the parent shell script's profile can read and write.

To find programs that are run by cron, inspect your local cron configuration. Unfortunately, cron configuration is rather complex, so there are numerous files to inspect. Periodic cron jobs are run from these files:

/etc/crontab 
/etc/cron.d/* 
/etc/cron.daily/* 
/etc/cron.hourly/*
/etc/cron.monthly/* 
/etc/cron.weekly/*

For root's cron jobs, edit the tasks with crontab -e and list root's cron tasks with crontab -l. You must be root for these to work.

Once you find these programs, you can use the Add Profile Wizard to create profiles for them. Refer to Section 22.1, “Adding a Profile Using the Wizard”.

An automated method for finding network server daemons that should be profiled is to use the aa-unconfined tool. You can also simply view a report of this information in the YaST module (refer to Section 26.3.1.1, “Application Audit Report” for instructions).

The aa-unconfined tool uses the command netstat -nlp to inspect your open ports from inside your computer, detect the programs associated with those ports, and inspect the set of Novell AppArmor profiles that you have loaded. aa-unconfined then reports these programs along with the Novell AppArmor profile associated with each program, or reports “none” (if the program is not confined).

If you create a new profile, you must restart the program that has been profiled to have it be effectively confined by AppArmor.

Below is a sample aa-unconfined output:

2325 /sbin/portmap not confined 
3702 /usr/sbin/sshd confined
   by '/usr/sbin/sshd (enforce)' 
4040 /usr/sbin/ntpd confined by '/usr/sbin/ntpd (enforce)' 
4373 /usr/lib/postfix/master confined by '/usr/lib/postfix/master (enforce)' 
4505 /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork confined by '/usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork (enforce)'
5274 /sbin/dhcpcd not confined 
5592 /usr/bin/ssh not confined 
7146 /usr/sbin/cupsd confined by '/usr/sbin/cupsd (complain)'
  

aa-unconfined requires root privileges and should not be run from a shell that is confined by an AppArmor profile.

aa-unconfined does not distinguish between one network interface and another, so it reports all unconfined processes, even those that might be listening to an internal LAN interface.

Finding user network client applications is dependent on your user preferences. The aa-unconfined tool detects and reports network ports opened by client applications, but only those client applications that are running at the time the aa-unconfined analysis is performed. This is a problem because network services tend to be running all the time, while network client applications tend only to be running when the user is interested in them.

Applying Novell AppArmor profiles to user network client applications is also dependent on user preferences. Therefore, we leave the profiling of user network client applications as an exercise for the user.

To aggressively confine desktop applications, the aa-unconfined command supports a paranoid option, which reports all processes running and the corresponding AppArmor profiles that might or might not be associated with each process. The user can then decide whether each of these programs needs an AppArmor profile.

If you have new or modified profiles, you can submit them to the apparmor-general@forge.novell.com mailing list along with a use case for the application behavior that you exercised. The AppArmor team reviews and may submit the work into openSUSE. We cannot guarantee that every profile will be included, but we make a sincere effort to include as much as possible so that end users can contribute to the security profiles that ship in openSUSE.

Alternatively, use the AppArmor profile repository to make your profiles available to other users and to download profiles created by other AppArmor users and the AppArmor developers. Refer to Chapter 21, AppArmor Profile Repositories for more information on how to use the AppArmor profile repository.

19.4.1. Immunizing Web Applications¶

To find Web applications, investigate your Web server configuration. The Apache Web server is highly configurable and Web applications can be stored in many directories, depending on your local configuration. openSUSE, by default, stores Web applications in /srv/www/cgi-bin/. To the maximum extent possible, each Web application should have an Novell AppArmor profile.

Once you find these programs, you can use the AppArmor Add Profile Wizard to create profiles for them. Refer to Section 22.1, “Adding a Profile Using the Wizard”.

Because CGI programs are executed by the Apache Web server, the profile for Apache itself, usr.sbin.httpd2-prefork for Apache2 on openSUSE, must be modified to add execute permissions to each of these programs. For instance, adding the line /srv/www/cgi-bin/my_hit_counter.pl rpx grants Apache permission to execute the Perl script my_hit_counter.pl and requires that there be a dedicated profile for my_hit_counter.pl. If my_hit_counter.pl does not have a dedicated profile associated with it, the rule should say /srv/www/cgi-bin/my_hit_counter.pl rix to cause my_hit_counter.pl to inherit the usr.sbin.httpd2-prefork profile.

Some users might find it inconvenient to specify execute permission for every CGI script that Apache might invoke. Instead, the administrator can grant controlled access to collections of CGI scripts. For instance, adding the line /srv/www/cgi-bin/*.{pl,py,pyc} rix allows Apache to execute all files in /srv/www/cgi-bin/ ending in .pl (Perl scripts) and .py or .pyc (Python scripts). As above, the ix part of the rule causes Python scripts to inherit the Apache profile, which is appropriate if you do not want to write individual profiles for each Python script.

If you want the subprocess confinement module (apache2-mod-apparmor) functionality when Web applications handle Apache modules (mod_perl and mod_php), use the ChangeHat features when you add a profile in YaST or at the command line. To take advantage of the subprocess confinement, refer to Section 24.1, “Apache ChangeHat”.

Profiling Web applications that use mod_perl and mod_php requires slightly different handling. In this case, the “program” is a script interpreted directly by the module within the Apache process, so no exec happens. Instead, the Novell AppArmor version of Apache calls change_hat() using a subprofile (a “hat”) corresponding to the name of the URI requested.

The name presented for the script to execute might not be the URI, depending on how Apache has been configured for where to look for module scripts. If you have configured your Apache to place scripts in a different place, the different names appear in log file when Novell AppArmor complains about access violations. See Chapter 26, Managing Profiled Applications.

For mod_perl and mod_php scripts, this is the name of the Perl script or the PHP page requested. For example, adding this subprofile allows the localtime.php page to execute and access the local system time:

/usr/bin/httpd2-prefork {
  # ...
  ^/cgi-bin/localtime.php {
    /etc/localtime                  r,
    /srv/www/cgi-bin/localtime.php  r,
    /usr/lib/locale/**              r,
  }
}

If no subprofile has been defined, the Novell AppArmor version of Apache applies the DEFAULT_URI hat. This subprofile is basically sufficient to display an HTML Web page. The DEFAULT_URI hat that Novell AppArmor provides by default is the following:

^DEFAULT_URI {
    /usr/sbin/suexec2                  mixr,
    /var/log/apache2/**                rwl,
    @{HOME}/public_html                r,
    @{HOME}/public_html/**             r,
    /srv/www/htdocs                    r,
    /srv/www/htdocs/**                 r,
    /srv/www/icons/*.{gif,jpg,png}     r,
    /srv/www/vhosts                    r,
    /srv/www/vhosts/**                 r,
    /usr/share/apache2/**              r,
    /var/lib/php/sess_*                rwl }
    

To use a single Novell AppArmor profile for all Web pages and CGI scripts served by Apache, a good approach is to edit the DEFAULT_URI subprofile.

19.4.2. Immunizing Network Agents¶

To find network server daemons and network clients (such as fetchmail, Firefox, Amarok or Banshee) that need to be profiled, you should inspect the open ports on your machine, consider the programs that are answering on those ports, and provide profiles for as many of those programs as possible. If you provide profiles for all programs with open network ports, an attacker cannot get to the file system on your machine without passing through a Novell AppArmor profile policy.

Scan your server for open network ports manually from outside the machine using a scanner (such as nmap), or from inside the machine using the netstat --inet -n -p command. Then, inspect the machine to determine which programs are answering on the discovered open ports.

Refer to the man page of the netstat command for a detailed reference of all possible options.