Here's a very nice article about it:
We are celebrating the SELinux 10th year anversary this year. Hard to believe it. SELinux was first introduced in Fedora Core 3 and later in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. For those who have never used SELinux, or would like an explanation... SElinux is a labeling system. Every process has a label. Every file/directory object in the operating system has a label. Even network ports, devices, and potentially hostnames have labels assigned to them. We write rules to control the access of a process label to an a object label like a file. We call this policy. The kernel enforces the rules. Sometimes this enforcement is called Mandatory Access Control (MAC). The owner of an object does not have discretion over the security attributes of a object. Standard Linux access control, owner/group + permission flags like rwx, is often called Discretionary Access Control (DAC). SELinux has no concept of UID or ownership of files. Everything is controlled by the labels. Meaning an SELinux system can be setup without an all powerful root process.Read more ...
