System Accounting with auditd

Description

The audit service provides substantial capabilities for recording system activities. By default, the service audits about SELinux AVC denials and certain types of security-relevant events such as system logins, account modifications, and authentication events performed by programs such as sudo. Under its default configuration, auditd has modest disk space requirements, and should not noticeably impact system performance.

NOTE: The Linux Audit daemon auditd can be configured to use the augenrules program to read audit rules files (*.rules) located in /etc/audit/rules.d location and compile them to create the resulting form of the /etc/audit/audit.rules configuration file during the daemon startup (default configuration). Alternatively, the auditd daemon can use the auditctl utility to read audit rules from the /etc/audit/audit.rules configuration file during daemon startup, and load them into the kernel. The expected behavior is configured via the appropriate ExecStartPost directive setting in the /usr/lib/systemd/system/auditd.service configuration file. To instruct the auditd daemon to use the augenrules program to read audit rules (default configuration), use the following setting:

ExecStartPost=-/sbin/augenrules --load

in the /usr/lib/systemd/system/auditd.service configuration file. In order to instruct the auditd daemon to use the auditctl utility to read audit rules, use the following setting:

ExecStartPost=-/sbin/auditctl -R /etc/audit/audit.rules

in the /usr/lib/systemd/system/auditd.service configuration file. Refer to [Service] section of the /usr/lib/systemd/system/auditd.service configuration file for further details.

Government networks often have substantial auditing requirements and auditd can be configured to meet these requirements. Examining some example audit records demonstrates how the Linux audit system satisfies common requirements. The following example from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Documentation available at https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html-single/selinux_users_and_administrators_guide/index#sect-Security-Enhanced_Linux-Fixing_Problems-Raw_Audit_Messages shows the substantial amount of information captured in a two typical "raw" audit messages, followed by a breakdown of the most important fields. In this example the message is SELinux-related and reports an AVC denial (and the associated system call) that occurred when the Apache HTTP Server attempted to access the /var/www/html/file1 file (labeled with the samba_share_t type):

type=AVC msg=audit(1226874073.147:96): avc:  denied  { getattr } for pid=2465 comm="httpd"
path="/var/www/html/file1" dev=dm-0 ino=284133 scontext=unconfined_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0
tcontext=unconfined_u:object_r:samba_share_t:s0 tclass=file

type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1226874073.147:96): arch=40000003 syscall=196 success=no exit=-13
a0=b98df198 a1=bfec85dc a2=54dff4 a3=2008171 items=0 ppid=2463 pid=2465 auid=502 uid=48
gid=48 euid=48 suid=48 fsuid=48 egid=48 sgid=48 fsgid=48 tty=(none) ses=6 comm="httpd"
exe="/usr/sbin/httpd" subj=unconfined_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 key=(null)

• msg=audit(1226874073.147:96)
  • The number in parentheses is the unformatted time stamp (Epoch time) for the event, which can be converted to standard time by using the date command.
• { getattr }
  • The item in braces indicates the permission that was denied. getattr indicates the source process was trying to read the target file's status information. This occurs before reading files. This action is denied due to the file being accessed having the wrong label. Commonly seen permissions include getattr, read, and write.
• comm="httpd"
  • The executable that launched the process. The full path of the executable is found in the exe= section of the system call (SYSCALL) message, which in this case, is exe="/usr/sbin/httpd".
• path="/var/www/html/file1"
  • The path to the object (target) the process attempted to access.
• scontext="unconfined_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0"
  • The SELinux context of the process that attempted the denied action. In this case, it is the SELinux context of the Apache HTTP Server, which is running in the httpd_t domain.
• tcontext="unconfined_u:object_r:samba_share_t:s0"
  • The SELinux context of the object (target) the process attempted to access. In this case, it is the SELinux context of file1. Note: the samba_share_t type is not accessible to processes running in the httpd_t domain.
• From the system call (SYSCALL) message, two items are of interest:
  • success=no: indicates whether the denial (AVC) was enforced or not. success=no indicates the system call was not successful (SELinux denied access). success=yes indicates the system call was successful - this can be seen for permissive domains or unconfined domains, such as initrc_t and kernel_t.
  • exe="/usr/sbin/httpd": the full path to the executable that launched the process, which in this case, is exe="/usr/sbin/httpd".