5.0 Profiling Your Web Applications Using ChangeHat

A Novell® AppArmor profile represents the security policy for an individual program instance or process. It applies to an executable program, but if a portion of the program needs different access permissions than other portions, the program can change hats to use a different security context, distinctive from the access of the main program. This is known as a hat or subprofile.

ChangeHat enables programs to change to or from a hat within a Novell AppArmor profile. It enables you to define security at a finer level than the process. This feature requires that each application be made ChangeHat aware meaning that it is modified to make a request to the Novell AppArmor module to switch security domains at arbitrary times during the application execution. Two examples for ChangeHat aware applications are the Apache Web server and Tomcat.

A profile can have an arbitrary number of subprofiles, but there are only two levels: a subprofile cannot have further sub-subprofiles. A subprofile is written as a separate profile and named as the containing profile followed by the subprofile name, separated by a ^. Subprofiles must be stored in the same file as the parent profile.