AppArmor protects systems from insecure or untrusted processes by running them in restricted confinement, while still allowing processes to share files, exercise privilege and communicate with other processes. AppArmor is a Mandatory Access Control (MAC) mechanism which uses the Linux Security Module (LSM) framework. The confinement's restrictions are mandatory and are not bound to identity, group membership, or object ownership. The protections provided are in addition to the kernel's regular access control mechanisms (including DAC) and can be used to restrict the superuser.
The AppArmor kernel module and accompanying user-space tools are available under the GPL license (the exception is the libapparmor library, available under the LGPL license, which allows change_hat(2) and change_profile(2) to be used by non-GPL binaries).
For more information, you can read the techdoc.pdf (available after building the parser) and by visiting the https://apparmor.net/ web site.
Please send all complaints, feature requests, rants about the software, and questions to the AppArmor mailing list.
Bug reports can be filed against the AppArmor project on GitLab or reported to the mailing list directly for those who wish not to register for an account on GitLab. See the wiki page for more information.
Security issues can be filed in GitLab by opening up a new issue and selecting the tick box This issue is confidential and should only be visible to team members with at least Reporter access. or directed to security@apparmor.net. Additional details can be found
in the wiki.
The AppArmor security project respects users privacy and data and does not collect data from or on its users beyond what is required for a given component to function.
The AppArmor kernel security module will log violations to the audit subsystem, and those will be logged/forwarded/recorded on the user's system(s) according to how the administrator has logging configured. Again this is not forwarded to or collected by the AppArmor project.
The AppArmor userspace tools do not collect information on the system user beyond the logs and information needed to interact with the user. This is not forwarded to, nor collected by the AppArmor project.
Users may submit information as part of an email, bug report or merge request, etc. and that will be recorded as part of the mailing list, bug/issue tracker, or code repository but only as part of a user initiated action.
The AppArmor project does not collect information from contributors beyond their interactions with the AppArmor project, code, and community. However contributors are subject to the terms and conditions and privacy policy of the individual platforms (currently GitLab) should they choose to contribute through those platforms. And those platforms may collect data on the user that the AppArmor project does not.
Currently GitLab requires a user account to submit patches or report bugs and issues. If a contributor does not wish to create an account for these platforms the mailing list is available. Membership in the list is not required. Content from non-list members will be sent to moderation, to ensure that it is on topic, so there may be a delay in choosing to interact in this way.
AppArmor consists of several different parts:
binutils/ source for basic utilities written in compiled languages
changehat/ source for using changehat with Apache, PAM and Tomcat
common/ common makefile rules
desktop/ empty
kernel-patches/ compatibility patches for various kernel versions
libraries/ libapparmor source and language bindings
parser/ source for parser/loader and corresponding documentation
profiles/ configuration files, reference profiles and abstractions
tests/ regression and stress testsuites
utils/ high-level utilities for working with AppArmor
While most of the kernel AppArmor code has been accepted in the upstream Linux kernel, a few important pieces were not included. These missing pieces unfortunately are important bits for AppArmor userspace and kernel interaction; therefore we have included compatibility patches in the kernel-patches/ subdirectory, versioned by upstream kernel (2.6.37 patches should apply cleanly to 2.6.38 source).
Without these patches applied to the kernel, the AppArmor userspace will not function correctly.
To build and install AppArmor userspace on your system, build and install in the following order. Some systems may need to export various python-related environment variables to complete the build. For example, before building anything on these systems, use something along the lines of:
$ export PYTHONPATH=$(realpath libraries/libapparmor/swig/python)
$ export PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3
$ export PYTHON_VERSION=3
$ export PYTHON_VERSIONS=python3
$ cd ./libraries/libapparmor
$ sh ./autogen.sh
$ sh ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-perl --with-python # see below
$ make
$ make check
$ make install
[an additional optional argument to libapparmor's configure is --with-ruby, to generate Ruby bindings to libapparmor.]
$ cd binutils
$ make
$ make check
$ make install
$ cd parser
$ make # depends on libapparmor having been built first
$ make check
$ make install
$ cd utils
$ make
$ make check PYFLAKES=/usr/bin/pyflakes3
$ make install
$ cd changehat/mod_apparmor
$ make # depends on libapparmor having been built first
$ make install
$ cd changehat/pam_apparmor
$ make # depends on libapparmor having been built first
$ make install
$ cd profiles
$ make
$ make check # depends on the parser having been built first
$ make install
[Note that for the parser, binutils, and utils, if you only wish to build/use some of the locale languages, you can override the default by passing the LANGS arguments to make; e.g. make all install "LANGS=en_US fr".]
A number of testsuites are in the AppArmor sources. Most have documentation on usage and how to update and add tests. Below is a quick overview of their location and how to run them.
For details on structure and adding tests, see tests/regression/apparmor/README.
To run:
$ cd tests/regression/apparmor (requires root)
$ make USE_SYSTEM=1
$ sudo make tests USE_SYSTEM=1
$ sudo bash open.sh -r # runs and saves the last testcase from open.sh
$ cd tests/regression/apparmor (requires root)
$ make
$ sudo make tests
$ sudo bash open.sh -r # runs and saves the last testcase from open.sh
For details on structure and adding tests, see parser/tst/README.
To run:
$ cd parser/tst
$ make
$ make tests
For details on structure and adding tests, see libraries/libapparmor/README.
$ cd libraries/libapparmor
$ make check
Tests for the Python utilities exist in the test/ subdirectory.
$ cd utils
$ make check
The aa-decode utility to be tested can be overridden by setting up environment variable APPARMOR_DECODE; e.g.:
$ APPARMOR_DECODE=/usr/bin/aa-decode make check
A basic consistency check to ensure that the parser and aa-logprof parse successfully the current set of shipped profiles. The system or other parser and logprof can be passed in by overriding the PARSER and LOGPROF variables.
$ cd profiles
$ make && make check
To run AppArmor stress tests:
$ make all
Use these:
$ ./change_hat
$ ./child
$ ./kill.sh
$ ./open
$ ./s.sh
Or run all at once:
$ ./stress.sh
Please note that the above will stress the system so much it may end up invoking the OOM killer.
To run parser stress tests (requires /usr/bin/ruby):
$ ./stress.sh
(see stress.sh -h for options)
Coverity scans are available to AppArmor developers at https://scan.coverity.com/projects/apparmor.
In order to submit a Coverity build for analysis, the cov-build binary must be discoverable from your PATH. See the "To Setup" section of https://scan.coverity.com/download?tab=cxx to obtain a pre-built copy of cov-build.
To generate a compressed tarball of an intermediate Coverity directory:
$ make coverity
The compressed tarball is written to apparmor-<SNAPSHOT_VERSION>-cov-int.tar.gz, where <SNAPSHOT_VERSION> is something like 2.10.90~3328, and must be uploaded to https://scan.coverity.com/projects/apparmor/builds/new for analysis. You must include the snapshot version in Coverity's project build submission form, in the "Project Version" field, so that it is quickly obvious to all AppArmor developers what snapshot of the AppArmor repository was used for the analysis.
TODO
The AppArmor userspace utilities are written with some assumptions about installed and available versions of other tools. This is a (possibly incomplete) list of known version dependencies:
The Python utilities require a minimum of Python 3.3.
The aa-notify tool's Python dependencies can be satisfied by installing the following packages (Debian package names, other distros may vary):
- python3-notify2
- python3-psutil
Perl is no longer needed since none of the utilities shipped to end users depend on it anymore.
Most shell scripts are written for POSIX-compatible sh. aa-decode expects bash, probably version 3.2 and higher.