Administrative Labels

Trusted Extensions provides two special administrative labels that are used as labels or clearances: ADMIN_HIGH and ADMIN_LOW. These labels are used to protect system resources and are intended for administrators rather than regular users.

ADMIN_HIGH is the highest label. ADMIN_HIGH dominates all other labels in the system and is used to protect system data, such as administration databases or audit trails, from being read. You must be in the global zone to read data that is labeled ADMIN_HIGH.

ADMIN_LOW is the lowest label. ADMIN_LOW is dominated by all other labels in a system, including labels for regular users. Mandatory access control does not permit users to write data to files with labels lower than the user's label. Thus, a file at the label ADMIN_LOW can be read by regular users, but cannot be modified. ADMIN_LOW is typically used to protect public executables that are shared, such as files in /usr/bin.