[CALUG] July 10 Meeting Announcement - Demystifying SELinux

[Chuck Frain]

Greetings All,

The next CALUG meeting will be happening this Wednesday June 9th from
6:30 until 9pmish. We will be welcoming Dave Quigley back to speak to
our group. He will be giving us a preview of his O'Reilly OSCON talk
titled "Demystifying SELinux: WTF is it saying?"

SELinux is a mandatory access control mechanism for Linux systems found
in several main stream distributions. All those fancy security terms may
be scary but in truth with a little bit of knowledge its possible to
find out WTF SELinux is saying to you.The talk will provide an
introduction to SELinux to help ordinary people understand basic SELinux
concepts and deal with issues that may arise during the operation of an
SELinux enabled system.

While more and more people are starting to do the legwork in
understanding SELinux instead of turning it off right away it still
seems like black magic to a great number of people. I’m here to let you
know that with a little bit of time and a few simple commands already on
your Linux machine you can begin to chip away at the SELinux’s hard
shell and get to the creamy nougat of understanding in the middle.

In the talk I’ll first try to convince you that what SELinux does is
important and that you shouldn’t turn it off. Next I will go over the
basics of what SELinux is and how it decides to protect your system
using a lovely audience member and an easy to understand exercise. Then
i’ll briefly cover the tools available to you to be able to ask and
answer the question “WTF is SELinux trying to tell me?” Finally I’ll
show two examples of SELinux problems and fix them live in front of the
audience with no safety netting.

At the end of the talk you’ll be flying high with your new understanding
of SELinux and be ready to take on the world. Next time someone says
SELinux instead of having that nauseous feeling in the pit of your
stomach you’ll be able to stand tall and say “Wait a minute! I saw a
talk on SELinux and I know WTF its saying to me!”

About Dave Quigley

David Quigley started his career as a Computer Systems Researcher for
the National Information Assurance Research Lab at the NSA where he
worked as a member of the SELinux team. David leads the design and
implementation efforts to provide Labeled-NFS support for SELinux. David
has previously contributed to the open source community through
maintaining the Unionfs 1.0 code base and through code contributions to
various other projects. David has presented at conferences such as the
Ottawa Linux Symposium, the StorageSS workshop, LinuxCon and several
local Linux User Group meetings where presentation topics have included
storage, file systems, and security. David currently works as a Computer
Science Professional for the Advanced Engineering and Development
division at Keyw Corporation.

The meeting will take place at OmniTI, located in Fulton, MD. The
address is 11830 West Market Place Fulton, MD 20759. The building is
near the Harris Teeter, easily seen from the road. When you approach the
HT head on, the OmniTI office building is to its right.

We'll be using the back entrance marked "F" since that will lead
directly to the meeting room.

Be sure to show up from 6:30 until 7 for pizza provided by Praxis
Engineering and socializing. We'll start the meeting about 7pm.

http://www.calug.org
http://www.praxiseng.com
http://omniti.com
http://omniti.com/is/here
http://selinuxproject.org/

-- 
Chuck Frain 
GPG Key: B2420431
http://www.chuckfrain.net