As part of our ongoing leadership in the SELinux community, Tresys – now Owl Cyber Defense, as the companies have recently merged – has developed SELint, a free tool designed to perform static code analysis on Reference Policy (refpolicy) SELinux source code. SELint is our latest contribution in our continued commitment to developing the open source community, building on previous contributions, including Certifiable Linux Integration Platform (CLIP), SETools, and more.

(Please note: SELint is not related to the tool of the same name developed by Elena Reshetova, Filippo Bonazzi, and N. Asokan for SEAndroid policy analysis)

SELint is designed to help developers write policy that is more maintainable, readable, and secure, and reduce the time spent debugging challenging policy issues. The tool checks for several common policy issues that can reduce maintainability and readability, generate policy that is counter to the intent of the policy writer, or cause difficult-to-diagnose errors. SELint is also fully configurable, enabling users to select a level of checking appropriate to their project.

SELint currently supports checks for the following policy issues:

• Violations of Reference Policy TE file ordering conventions
• Interface with no documentation comment
• Use of require blocks
• File context labels associated with the wrong module
• Type referenced without explicit declaration
• Type, attribute, or role used but not listed in require block in interface
• Unused type, attribute, or role listed in require block in interface
• Potentially unescaped regex character in file contexts paths
• Interface call that should be in optional_policy block, but is not
• Syntactically incorrect file context format
• Nonexistent user, role, or type listed in fc file

SELint can be downloaded for free at: https://github.com/TresysTechnology/selint