The wide adoption of Docker and the ability to retrieve images from different sources impose strict security constraints. Docker leverages Linux kernel security facilities, such as namespaces, cgroups and Mandatory Access Control, to guarantee an effective isolation of containers. In order to increase Docker security and flexibility, we propose an extension to the Dockerfile format to let image maintainers ship a specific SELinux policy for the processes that run in a Docker image, enhancing the security of containers.

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The evolution of information systems sees an increasing need of flexible and sophisticated approaches for the automated detection of anomalies in security policies. One of these anomalies is redundancy, which may increase the total cost of management of the policies and may reduce the performance of access control mechanisms and of other anomaly detection techniques.We consider three approaches that can remove redundancy from access control policies, progressively reducing the number of authorizations in the policy itself. We show that several problems associated with redundancy are NPhard. We propose exact solutions to two of these problems, namely the Minimum Policy Problem, which consists in computing the minimum policy that represents the behaviour of the system, and the Minimum Irreducible Policy Problem, consisting in computing the redundancy-free version of a policy with the smallest number of authorizations. Furthermore we propose heuristic solutions to those problems. We also present a comparison between the exact and heuristics solutions based on experiments that use policies derived from bibliographical databases.

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The support for Mandatory Access Control offered by SELinux has become a significant component of the security design of the Android operating system, offering robust protection and the ability to support system-level policies enforced by all the elements of the system. A well-known security-sensitive aspect of Android that currently SELinux does not cover is the abuse of intents, which represent the Android approach to inter-process communication. We propose SEIntentFirewall, an SELinux intent manager that provides fine-grained access control over Intent objects, permitting to cover within MAC policies the use of intents.