Configure auditd Rules for Comprehensive Auditing

Description

The auditd program can perform comprehensive monitoring of system activity. This section describes recommended configuration settings for comprehensive auditing, but a full description of the auditing system's capabilities is beyond the scope of this guide. The mailing list linux-audit@redhat.com exists to facilitate community discussion of the auditing system.

The audit subsystem supports extensive collection of events, including:

• Tracing of arbitrary system calls (identified by name or number) on entry or exit.
• Filtering by PID, UID, call success, system call argument (with some limitations), etc.
• Monitoring of specific files for modifications to the file's contents or metadata.

Auditing rules at startup are controlled by the file /etc/audit/audit.rules. Add rules to it to meet the auditing requirements for your organization. Each line in /etc/audit/audit.rules represents a series of arguments that can be passed to auditctl and can be individually tested during runtime. See documentation in /usr/share/doc/audit-VERSION and in the related man pages for more details.

If copying any example audit rulesets from /usr/share/doc/audit-VERSION, be sure to comment out the lines containing arch= which are not appropriate for your system's architecture. Then review and understand the following rules, ensuring rules are activated as needed for the appropriate architecture.

After reviewing all the rules, reading the following sections, and editing as needed, the new rules can be activated as follows:

$ sudo service auditd restart