Recently, I wrote a blog post showing how to enforce SELinux with Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). The Linux distributions derived from RedHat use SELinux. There is another major mandatory discretionary access control (DAC) system, AppArmor. Ubuntu, for example, installs AppArmor by default. If you are concerned by computer security and use PXC on Ubuntu, you should enforce AppArmor. This post will guide you through the steps of creating a profile for PXC and enabling it. If you don’t want to waste time, you can just grab my profile, it seems to work fine. Adapt it to your environment if you are using non-standard paths. Look at the section “Copy the profile” for how to install it. For the brave, let’s go!

Install the tools

In order to do anything with AppArmor, we need to install the tools. On Ubuntu 18.04, I did:

The apparmor-utils package provides the tools we need to generate a skeleton profile and parse the system logs.

Create a skeleton profile

AppArmor is fairly different from SELinux. Instead of attaching security tags to resources, you specify what a given binary can access, and how, in a text file. Also, processes can inherit permissions from their parent. We will only create a profile for the mysqld_safe script and it will cover the mysqld process and the SST scripts as they are executed under it. You create the skeleton profile like this:

On Ubuntu 18.04, there seems to be a bug. I reported it and apparently I am not the only one with the issue. If you get a “KeyError” error with the above command, try:

The aa-autodep command creates the profile “usr.bin.mysqld_safe” in the /etc/apparmor.d directory. The initial content is:

I suggest you add, ahead of time, things you know are needed. In my case, I added:

This will save time on redundant questions later. Those entries are permissions granted to mysqld_safe. For example, /etc/mysql** r  allows to read everything in /etc/mysql  and its subdirectories. These lines need to go right after the /usr/bin/mysqld_safe r,  line. Once done, parse and load the profile with:

Get a well behaved SST script

If you read my previous blog post on SELinux, you may recall the wsrep_sst_xtrabackup-v2  script does not behave well, security wise. The Percona developers have released a fixed version but it may not be available yet in a packaged form. In the meantime, you can download it from github.

Start iterating

My initial thought was to put the profile in complain mode, generate activity and parse the logs with aa-logprof to get entries to add to the profile. Likely there is something I am doing wrong but in complain mode, aa-logprof detects nothing. In order to get something I had to enforce the profile with:

Then, I iterated many times—like more than 20—over the following sequence:

  1. rm -rf /var/lib/mysql/* # optional
  2. systemctl start mysql &
  3. tail -f /var/log/mysqld.log /var/log/kern.log
  4. systemctl stop mysql
  5. ps fax | egrep ‘mysqld_safe|mysqld’ | grep -v grep | awk ‘{print $1}’ | xargs kill -9 # sometimes
  6. aa-logprof
  7. if something was not right, jump back to step 1

See the next section for how to run aa-logprof. Once that sequence worked well, I tried SST (joiner/donor) roles and IST.

Parse the logs with aa-logprof

Now, the interesting part begins, parsing the logs. Simply begin the process with:

and answer the questions. Be careful, I made many mistakes before I got it right, remember I am more a DBA than a Sysadmin. For example, you’ll get questions like:

AppArmor asks you how it should provide read access to the /etc/hosts.allow  file. If you answer right away with “A”, it will add #include <abstractions/lxc/container-base> to the profile. With all the dependencies pulled by the lxc-related includes, you basically end up allowing nearly everything. You must first press “3” to get:

Notice the “[ ]” have moved to the bottom entry and then, press “A”. You’ll also get questions like:

For such a question, my answer is “I” for inherit. After a while, you’ll get through all the questions and you’ll be asked to save the profile:

Revise the profile

Do not hesitate to edit the profile if you see, for example, many similar file entries which could be replaced by a “*” or “**”. If you manually modify the profile, you need to parse it to load your changes:

Copy the profile

Once you have a server running with AppArmor enforced on PXC, simply copy the profile to the other servers and parse it. For example:

You can always verify if the profile is enforced with:

Once enforced, I strongly advise to monitor the log files on a regular basis to see if anything has been overlooked. Similarly if you encounter a strange and unexpected behavior with PXC. Have the habit of checking the logs, it might save a lot of frustrating work.

Conclusion

As we have just seen, enabling AppArmor with PXC is not a difficult task, it just requires some patience. AppArmor is an essential component of a layered security approach. It achieves similar goals as the other well known DAC framework, SELinux. With the rising security concerns and the storage of sensitive data in databases, there are compelling reasons to enforce a DAC framework. I hope these two posts will help DBAs and Sysadmins to configure and enable DAC for PXC.