SELinux vs AppArmor
 

SELinux is very hard to configure. AppArmor is more user friendly. Can any one compare these ? I have gone through different posts. But could not find the exact comparison between these two in the eyes of users and not the companies.

I guess the biggest reason to use SELinux over AppArmor would be that the former is still in active development.

According to this WikiPedia article Novell laid off most of the AppArmor team in 2007:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor

I admit I don't know the specifics about this case, but it would make sense to me if the amount of developers needed at an early, more volatile stage would be greater than those needed at a later, more stable one. When it comes to software maintenance, I think the open-source community has time and time again proven that it can step up to the plate. I guess what I'm saying is that these layoffs might at first sound like Novell was losing interest in AppArmor, but it could instead be a case of them making necessary (and possibly expected) adjustments/improvement to their development model. Kinda reminds me of Linux itself. I believe Linus Torvalds is the only one who is actually on OSDL's Linux kernel development payroll, no? Or at least he's one of the very few, relative to the amount of people that contribute code.

Since other distros like ubuntu are using AppArmor I'd bet that it's still in active development. SELinux and AppArmor are very similar, SELinux is more complex, comprehensive, and secure. However AppArmor is much easier to configure, use, and still adds a great deal of protection. The major difference is AppArmor uses paths to do its decision making which gives it an advantage for network filesystems like NFS, but has drawbacks in that you can compromise it by making a new path to the data, say by a hard link. For local filesystems you deal with that issue by making critical apps immutable.

Either is great and adds yet another layer of security, neither is a magic bullet that will solve all your security issues.

In fact in this article referenced in the original Wikipedia article it says among other things that:
1) The primary developer plans to continue working on AppArmor.
2) Novell intends to continue supporting and updatign AppArmor.
3) There is an AppArmor community and that may be why Novell decided they didn't need to pay an in house team.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-97...g=2547-1_3-0-5

By the way the original Wikipedia article does discuss some of the differences between AppArmor and SELinux.