Active Directory made easy
GNOME gets along with AD
Fedora should be able to be used on an Active Directory domain (or other kerberos realms, such as IPA) out of the box. It should be easy to configure domain logins on a Fedora machine, and then it should be intuitive and uneventful to login with those credentials.
These improvements will also increase reliability and ease usage for any Kerberos realm, not just active directory. Improvement has been made in much of the login and authentication stack, which now includes realmd and adcli.
The GNOME "User Accounts" Settings GUI features support for enterprise logins.
IPA improves AD Support
With Fedora 18 it would be possible to create a trust relationship between an IPA and an Active Directory domain which would allow users from one domain to access resource of the other domain. The FreeIPA project has documented the feature at http://freeipa.org/page/IPAv3_testing_AD_trust.
Secure Boot
UEFI Secure Boot will be supported in Fedora 18. This will allow Fedora to boot on systems that have Secure Boot enabled. Tools are available for administrators to create custom certificates to sign local changes to GRUB or the kernel.
rngd
Random number generation is improved by enabling rngd by default.
Secure Containers
Using SELinux and virt-sandbox, services can be run in secure sandboxes, even as root. The virt-sandbox-service package will create mount points and a libvirt container.
SELinux boolean renaming
In order to clarify the purpose of SELinux booleans, all settings that begin with "allow" will be renamed to reflect their domain. Existing policy booleans will continue to be supported.
SELinux Systemd Access Control
Support has been added to systemd to check unit files against SELinux settings before allowing a process to start or stop the service.
System calls restricted
` The libseccomp library is now available, which provides applications with an easy way to reduce the potential damage of exploits, leveraging kernel syscall filters. Virtual machines benefit from this as QEMU/KVM now uses libseccomp.
usermode
usermode, a wrapper to provide superuser privileges to unprivileged users, is being phased out in favor of polkit.
Kerberos credentials moved and improved
Fedora 18 changes the standard location of Kerberos credential caches to /run/user/$UID in order to increase security and simplify locating the caches for NFSv4. Fedora's Kerberos support will now allow users to maintain credentials for multiple identities and for the GSSAPI client code to automatically select credentials based on the target service and hostname.
halt, poweroff, reboot Configuration Moved
The ability to use halt(8), poweroff(8) and reboot(8) commands by unprivileged users is now controlled using polkit, see the actions in /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.login1.policy . The PAM configuration files /etc/pam.d/{halt,poweroff,reboot} are no longer used and their content, if any, is ignored.