Have you guys seen this AppArmor talk? (272 meg video off of FTP) Working at Novell I’ve heard “AppArmor” thrown around in conversations and that it more or less was analogous to SELinux, but I really had no idea the power of it until I watched this FOSDEM talk. It’s totally rad; it can analyze running applications to see what network ports are opened, what files are accessed, and what POSIX capabilities are used and then takes you through step-by-step for generating profiles on a per-application basis. This seems like a killer feature to me; SELinux always seemed so ridiculously difficult to configure that I never felt safe doing it. I’m clearly not the only one; it took Red Hat months to get it working well enough in Fedora to do a release. SELinux also seems to have a big disadvantage in that virtually every application has to be instrumented to take advantage of it. AppArmor appears to have a much lower barrier to entry. The project website doesn’t give you a feel for how totally awesome it is — you need to watch the video for that — but it is open source and you can download it and try it out. If you’re using SUSE Linux 10.0 or the 10.1 betas, it is integrated into the distro already.

Update: Oh yeah, the reason why I stumbled upon this AppArmor talk is because Jon‘s Beagle talk is also up there. Even if you know everything else about Beagle, it’s worth watching if for no other reason to see my name in seven-foot high letters.