The TrustedBSD MAC Framework provides a number of library and system calls permitting applications to manage MAC labels on objects using a policy-agnostic interface. This permits applications to manipulate labels for a variety of policies without being written to support specific policies. These interfaces are used by general-purpose tools such as ifconfig(8), ls(1) and ps(1) to view labels on network interfaces, files, and processes. The APIs also support MAC management tools including getfmac(8), getpmac(8), setfmac(8), setfsmac(8), and setpmac(8). The MAC APIs are documented in mac(3).

Applications handle MAC labels in two forms: an internalized form used to return and set labels on processes and objects (mac_t), and externalized form based on C strings appropriate for storage in configuration files, display to the user, or input from the user. Each MAC label contains a number of elements, each consisting of a name and value pair. Policy modules in the kernel bind to specific names and interpret the values in policy-specific ways. In the externalized string form, labels are represented by a comma-delimited list of name and value pairs separated by the / character. Labels may be directly converted to and from text using provided APIs; when retrieving labels from the kernel, internalized label storage must first be prepared for the desired label element set. Typically, this is done in one of two ways: using mac_prepare(3) and an arbitrary list of desired label elements, or one of the variants of the call that loads a default element set from the mac.conf(5) configuration file. Per-object defaults permit application writers to usefully display labels associated with objects without being aware of the policies present in the system.

The standard user context management interface, setusercontext(3), has been modified to retrieve MAC labels associated with a user's class from login.conf(5). These labels are then set along with other user context when either LOGIN_SETALL is specified, or when LOGIN_SETMAC is explicitly specified.