Enable auditd Service

Description

The auditd service is an essential userspace component of the Linux Auditing System, as it is responsible for writing audit records to disk. The auditd service can be enabled with the following manifest:

---
apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
kind: MachineConfig
metadata:
  labels:
    machineconfiguration.openshift.io/role: master
  name: 75-master-auditd-enable
spec:
  config:
    ignition:
      version: 3.1.0
    systemd:
      units:
      - name: auditd.service
        enabled: true

This will enable the auditd service in all the nodes labeled with the "master" role.

Note that this needs to be done for each MachineConfigPool

For more information on how to configure nodes with the Machine Config Operator see the relevant documentation.

Rationale

Without establishing what type of events occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. Ensuring the auditd service is active ensures audit records generated by the kernel are appropriately recorded.

Additionally, a properly configured audit subsystem ensures that actions of individual system users can be uniquely traced to those users so they can be held accountable for their actions.