The Lions’ Commentary finally arrived. After weeks of waiting with one of the large online booksellers, they canceled the order. So I emailed the publisher, Peer to Peer Communications, and they suggested buying from Lulu, which worked out well. A colleague had exactly the same experience.

The SELinux Symposium in Maryland was very well attended. Slides from the talks are available now here. It’s good to see such a high level of interest displayed on a project that you’ve been working on for years. At this stage it seems that most of the interest is from government related folk, and not yet the wider enterprise or general user communities. (Although there does seem to be broader involvement in Japan).

One of the challenges for the SELinux project now, I feel, is to gain more traction with the wider community. After chatting with some people at the symposium, I’ve got a few ideas for progress in this area.

Another critical factor is the evolution of the SELinux toolchain, particularly relating to policy management. Looks like there’s some good fundamental work going on here.

Enhancing the security of the desktop is a major challenge. Colin Walters presented a good overview of the problem space and provided some examples of work he’s been doing, while Jim Gettys held a BoF session on Security Enhanced X (not sure if there are any notes from this available). Desktop SELinux integration is definitely an area that someone looking to make a mark in the open source world should have a look at, it’s fertile and somewhat unexplored ground, and there are some very highly experienced people likely available to mentor.