Where SQL Server Audit is in use, SQL Server must generate audit records when unsuccessful attempts to retrieve privileges/permissions occur.
An XCCDF Rule
Description
<VulnDiscussion>Under some circumstances, it may be useful to monitor who/what is reading privilege/permission/role information. Therefore, it must be possible to configure auditing to do this. DBMSs typically make such information available through views or functions. This requirement addresses explicit requests for privilege/permission/role membership information. It does not refer to the implicit retrieval of privileges/permissions/role memberships that the DBMS continually performs to determine if any and every action on the database is permitted. To aid in diagnosis, it is necessary to keep track of failed attempts in addition to the successful ones. Use of SQL Server Audit is recommended. All features of SQL Server Audit are available in the Enterprise and Developer editions of SQL Server 2014. It is not available at the database level in other editions. For this or legacy reasons, the instance may be using SQL Server Trace for auditing, which remains an acceptable solution for the time being. Note, however, that Microsoft intends to remove most aspects of Trace at some point after SQL Server 2016. This requirement applies to SQL Server Audit-based audit trails; Trace does not have this capability. Use of SQL Server Audit's SCHEMA_OBJECT_ACCESS_GROUP causes capture of all accesses, successful and otherwise, to the system views (and all other schema-scoped objects). The [Succeeded] column in the audit output indicates the success or failure of the attempted action. Be aware, however, that it may report True in some cases where one would intuitively expect False. For example, SELECT 1/0 FROM SYS.ALL_OBJECTS will appear in the audit trail as successful, if the user has permission to perform that action, even though it contains an invalid expression. Some other actions that one would consider failures (such as selecting from a table that does not exist) may not appear at all.</VulnDiscussion><FalsePositives></FalsePositives><FalseNegatives></FalseNegatives><Documentable>false</Documentable><Mitigations></Mitigations><SeverityOverrideGuidance></SeverityOverrideGuidance><PotentialImpacts></PotentialImpacts><ThirdPartyTools></ThirdPartyTools><MitigationControl></MitigationControl><Responsibility></Responsibility><IAControls></IAControls>
- ID
- SV-213859r395712_rule
- Severity
- Medium
- References
- Updated
Remediation - Manual Procedure
Design and deploy a SQL Server Audit that captures all auditable events. The script provided in the supplemental file Audit.sql can be used for this.
Alternatively, to add the necessary data capture to an existing server audit specification, run the script:
USE [master];
GO
ALTER SERVER AUDIT SPECIFICATION <server_audit_specification_name> WITH (STATE = OFF);