Audit for live supervision

[John Dennis]

Kay Hayen wrote:
> No, when opening the socket the to the sub deamon audisp. I couldn't convice 
> myself how the API would work with a socket. Does it?
>   

The auparse library can read a stream by opening the parser with 
AUSOURCE_FEED, you set a callback, then feed arbitrary number of bytes 
into the parser by calling auparse_feed(), you'll be called back when a 
complete event is found, at that point just use the normal auparse 
functions.

You can read off of this unix socket (/var/run/audispd_events) but this 
is deprecated. It is now preferred is now to use a audispd plugin and 
read from stdin. See the audit src package and look in audisp/plugins 
for examples. FWIW I noticed that code was calling fgets to get data to 
feed to auparse_feed() but it seems inefficient to buffer lines twice, 
auparse_feed will do the line protocol.
> I read that as that we can use the netlink socket with the libaudit directly, 
> which sort of could be exactly what we want. That would mean we wouldn't use 
> audit user space (processes) at all, right?
>
>   
No, you really want to use the user space interface (see above).
>   
>> You have 4 points to get the audit stream, in order of distance from the
>> event generation: the audit netlink socket, auditd realtime interface,
>> audisp plugin interface, and the af_unix socket created by the af_unix
>> plugin from audispd. For higher reliability where you don't want of need
>> any other audit processing interfering, I would say use either of the first
>> 2.
>>     
>
> The latency is getting higher with each step. For optimal performance we would 
> listen to the netlink socket and duplicate only the code essential to process 
> what we are interested it. 
>
> For extra points and hurt, we would do it in Ada and inside the target 
> process, really achieving the low latency. It may be the only realistic 
> option, but it also feels like duplication of effort. We have done netlink 
> interfaces in Ada before, but also have on our mind that it was said that the 
> netlink interface was said (not by you) to be still in flux. Is that still 
> true?
>
> It certainly would be nice if the audisp had some form of output that can be 
> fed directly into libaudit parsing as it comes in. But that may be an 
> unrealistic expectation, is it?
>
>   
It does, see above comment.


-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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