It’s been way to long since my last post on this subject. I’ve been rolling around ideas in my head for the elements that will make this Lab good, or bad for that matter. I’m just going to dump them here and refine them as I either as I run across new requirements or I realize that something on this list is a bad idea.

• The lab task should focus on policy development and what it means to the system as a whole. Integrity and secrecy should both be addressed as part of the lab.
• Set up of the lab should take no effort on the part of the student. SELinux should already be installed with a known good policy on their systems. The only thing they should be concerned with is writing policy, maybe some code to confine, building the policy, inserting it into the kernel and debugging the output.
• This lab is intended to reinforce the mandatory access control concept. It’s not an SELinux lab per se. SELinux is just the MAC system used to reinforce the MAC concept. This implies that the Lab shouldn’t be bogged down in the details of managing an SELinux system. Since the labs are intended to be run from a Ubuntu VM we have to be sure SELinux is well supported or already set up on this VM.
• Following the previous point it’s important that the MAC concepts from the class lecture be incorporated into the lab explicitly. It’s been a while since I took the class that this lab will be taught in so getting a copy of the lecture notes and ensuring I’m reinforcing the right concepts is important. I may need to make suggestions for new topics to be discussed in class but I’ll try to keep changes to the lecture minimal.
• It would be nice if we could make practical links to a previous lab showing how MAC can defend against specific attacks. There is a lab used in this class showing buffer overflows at work. Showing the code previously developed for the buffer overflow lab thwarted by SELinux would be cool. After walking through an example this would make a good independent task for the students to undertake.
• Simplicity. Keep the policy developed from getting too scary is a must.
• The Reference policy by far the policy “language” to use when developing “real” policy but exposure to the raw policy is a must. It may make sense to have students determine the raw policy needed to perform a task and then have them hunt through the reference policy interfaces searching for the right interface to use. That could get ugly though. That may not even be practical since reading the reference policy requires a certain amount of skill. This ones gona take some thought.

I’m going to let these sit for a day or two and do some thinking. Refinements will follow as will a task list derived from the “final” requirements. I know, requirements are never final but I’ll pretend they are when I move on to the tasks … at least until they change. I’m interested in any comments or suggestions that the interwebs may have so let me know what you think.