Adding enterprise capability - an includeConfig directive for audit.rules?

[Burn Alting]

Thanks for these comments Steve.

I will come up with a solution based on option one. Perhaps along the
line of a script (to suit both auditd.init and auditd.service) that
	a. Looks for a known directory, say /etc/audit/auditd.rules
	b. If not empty, it will concatenate all files of the form xxx.rules,
stripping comments and blank lines. The xxx will determine sort.
	c. If the resultant file is not empty, it can
replace /etc/audit/audit.rules.

Rgds



On Tue, 2013-04-02 at 14:03 -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 08:38:07 PM Burn Alting wrote:
> > All,
> > 
> > Has anyone considered allowing an includeConfig statement for
> > audit.rules (or auditd.conf if need be)?
> > 
> > The action would be to, at that point in the parse (or the end of the
> > file, if auditd.conf holds the directive), open the nominated directory
> > and any files within, and parse them.
> > 
> > The idea is to allow for localization of audit. At an enterprise level
> > one would deploy the common, corporate set of rules
> > in /etc/audit/audit.rules. Should a local system need additional rules
> > such as tailored file watches, workstation or capability specific
> > monitoring, these could appear in files in the includeConfig directory.
> > That way, distribution mechanisms such as puppet, rpm satellite server,
> > apt repositories, etc can maintain the corporate set of rules without
> > changing localized configurations on updates.
> 
> Sorry for the late reply, been out a bit and am trying to catch up on email.
> 
> Well...have you heard of SCAP? Its a whole framework for assessing the 
> security posture of a system based on open standards to prevent vendor lockin. 
> It can also allow for continuous monitoring, boot up attestation via TNC, 
> patch management, and we are working on some basic level of remediation.
> 
> More info about SCAP can be found at these sites:
> http://scap.nist.gov/
> http://makingsecuritymeasurable.mitre.org/
> 
> We have an openscap project
> http://www.open-scap.org/
> 
> There is an SCAP Security Guide which will become a STIG:
> https://fedorahosted.org/scap-security-guide/
> 
> And its being integrated into various systems management tools. The reason I 
> mention this is that currently there is no way that you could evaluate audit 
> rules from an SCAP based tool with a decomposed set of audit rules. The OVAL 
> interpreter is the limitation. It does not have any method of being able to 
> smartly assemble the collective audit rules to assess if the system is in 
> compliance. In the audit system, the order of rules matters and that is one of 
> the problems OVAL would have to be specified and coded to understand.
> 
> So with SCAP in mind, the options seem to be:
> 
> 1) Build a rule compiler that assembles a master audit.rules file from 
> sources but only 1 set of rules are loaded.
> 2) Request a change in OVAL 5.11 to support this kind of setup. Sometime 
> around 2014 NIST should have it approved and content developers can use it. 
> This means holding off the functionality a bit because we can't allow audit 
> configurations that cannot be monitored.
> 3) ??  (Any other ideas)
> 
> OVAL has limited capability for reading file formats. Changes in capability 
> have a long lead time. Audit configuration is very important to be able to 
> assess from SCAP. For example, the DISA STIG and USGCB would mandate it. I 
> think someone is working on a DSS-PCI profile which would also include some 
> form of audit rule tests.
> 
> In my opinion, the ability to assess the audit system's compliance has to take 
> SCAP into account and solutions to allow drop in audit rule additions ought to 
> fit within those limitations. I would imagine the same set of people that care 
> about audit rules are nearly the same set of people that care about SCAP.
> 
> -Steve
>