If you notice odd application behavior or any other type of application problem, you should first check the reject messages in the log files to see if AppArmor is too closely constricting your application. If you detect reject messages that indicate that your application or service is too closely restricted by AppArmor, update your profile to properly handle your use case of the application. Do this with aa-logprof (Section 24.6.3.9, “aa-logprof—Scanning the System Log”).

If you decide to run your application or service without AppArmor protection, remove the application's profile from /etc/apparmor.d or move it to another location.

If you have been using previous versions of AppArmor and have updated your system (but kept your old set of profiles) you might notice some applications which seemed to work perfectly before you updated behaving strangely, or not working at all.

This version of AppArmor introduces a set of new features to the profile syntax and the AppArmor tools that might cause trouble with older versions of the AppArmor profiles. Those features are:

The current version of AppArmor mediates file locking and introduces a new permission mode (k) for this. Applications requesting file locking permission might misbehave or fail altogether if confined by older profiles which do not explicitly contain permissions to lock files. If you suspect this being the case, check the log file under /var/log/audit/audit.log for entries like the following:

type=AVC msg=audit(1389862802.727:13939): apparmor="DENIED" \
operation="file_lock" parent=2692 profile="/usr/bin/opera" \
name="/home/tux/.qt/.qtrc.lock" pid=28730 comm="httpd2-prefork" \
requested_mask="::k" denied_mask="::k" fsuid=30 ouid=0

Update the profile using the aa-logprof command as outlined below.

The new network access control syntax based on the network family and type specification, described in Section 21.5, “Network Access Control”, might cause application misbehavior or even stop applications from working. If you notice a network-related application behaving strangely, check the log file under /var/log/audit/audit.log for entries like the following:

type=AVC msg=audit(1389864332.233:13947): apparmor="DENIED" \
operation="socket_create" family="inet" parent=29985 profile="/bin/ping" \
sock_type="raw" pid=30251 comm="ping"

This log entry means that our example application, /bin/ping in this case, failed to get AppArmor's permission to open a network connection. This permission needs to be explicitly stated to make sure that an application has network access. To update the profile to the new syntax, use the aa-logprof command as outlined below.

The current kernel requires the SYS_PTRACE capability, if a process tries to access files in /proc/pid/fd/*. New profiles need an entry for the file and the capability, where old profiles only needed the file entry. For example:

/proc/*/fd/**  rw,

in the old syntax would translate to the following rules in the new syntax:

capability SYS_PTRACE,
/proc/*/fd/**  rw,

To update the profile to the new syntax, use the YaST Update Profile Wizard or the aa-logprof command as outlined below.

With this version of AppArmor, a few changes have been made to the profile rule syntax to better distinguish directory from file access. Therefore, some rules matching both file and directory paths in the previous version might now match a file path only. This could lead to AppArmor not being able to access a crucial directory, and thus trigger misbehavior of your application and various log messages. The following examples highlight the most important changes to the path syntax.

Using the old syntax, the following rule would allow access to files and directories in /proc/net. It would allow directory access only to read the entries in the directory, but not give access to files or directories under the directory, e.g. /proc/net/dir/foo would be matched by the asterisk (*), but as foo is a file or directory under dir, it cannot be accessed.

/proc/net/*  r,

To get the same behavior using the new syntax, you need two rules instead of one. The first allows access to the file under /proc/net and the second allows access to directories under /proc/net. Directory access can only be used for listing the contents, not actually accessing files or directories underneath the directory.

/proc/net/*  r,  
/proc/net/*/  r,

The following rule works similarly both under the old and the new syntax, and allows access to both files and directories under /proc/net (but does not allow a directory listing of /proc/net/ itself):

/proc/net/**  r,

To distinguish file access from directory access using the above expression in the new syntax, use the following two rules. The first one only allows to recursively access directories under /proc/net while the second one explicitly allows for recursive file access only.

/proc/net/**/  r,  
/proc/net/**[^/]  r,

The following rule works similarly both under the old and the new syntax and allows access to both files and directories beginning with foo under /proc/net:

/proc/net/foo**  r,

To distinguish file access from directory access in the new syntax and use the ** globbing pattern, use the following two rules. The first one would have matched both files and directories in the old syntax, but only matches files in the new syntax because of the missing trailing slash. The second rule matched neither file nor directory in the old syntax, but matches directories only in the new syntax:

/proc/net/**foo  r,
/proc/net/**foo/  r,

The following rules illustrate how the use of the ? globbing pattern has changed. In the old syntax, the first rule would have matched both files and directories (four characters, last character could be any but a slash). In the new syntax, it matches only files (trailing slash is missing). The second rule would match nothing in the old profile syntax, but matches directories only in the new syntax. The last rule matches explicitly matches a file called bar under /proc/net/foo?. Using the old syntax, this rule would have applied to both files and directories:

/proc/net/foo?  r,    
/proc/net/foo?/  r, 
/proc/net/foo?/bar  r,

To find and resolve issues related to syntax changes, take some time after the update to check the profiles you want to keep and proceed as follows for each application you kept the profile for:

After installing additional Apache modules (like apache2-mod_apparmor) or making configuration changes to Apache, profile Apache again to find out if additional rules need to be added to the profile. If you do not profile Apache again, it could be unable to start properly or be unable to serve Web pages.

Run aa-disable PROGRAMNAME to disable the profile for PROGRAMNAME. This command creates a symbolic link to the profile in /etc/apparmor.d/disable/. To reactivate the profile, delete the link, and run systemctl reload apparmor.

Managing profiles with AppArmor requires you to have access to the log of the system on which the application is running. So you do not need to run the application on your profile build host as long as you have access to the machine that runs the application. You can run the application on one system, transfer the logs (/var/log/audit.log or, if audit is not installed, journalctl | grep -i apparmor > path_to_logfile) to your profile build host and run aa-logprof -f path_to_logfile.

Manually editing AppArmor profiles can introduce syntax errors. If you attempt to start or restart AppArmor with syntax errors in your profiles, error results are shown. This example shows the syntax of the entire parser error.

localhost:~ # rcapparmor start
Loading AppArmor profiles AppArmor parser error in /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.squid at line 410: syntax error, unexpected TOK_ID, expecting TOK_MODE
 Profile /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.squid failed to load

Using the AppArmor YaST tools, a graphical error message indicates which profile contained the error and requests you to fix it.

To fix a syntax error, log in to a terminal window as root, open the profile, and correct the syntax. Reload the profile set with systemctl reload apparmor.

Tip: AppArmor Syntax Highlighting in vi

The editor vi on openSUSE Leap supports syntax highlighting for AppArmor profiles. Lines containing syntax errors will be displayed with a red background.