Use case not covered by the audit library?

[Gulland, Scott A]

Hi Burn,

From: linux-audit-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:linux-audit-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Burn Alting
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2015 11:56 AM
To: Steve Grubb
Cc: linux-audit at redhat.com
Subject: Re: Use case not covered by the audit library?


On 17 Dec 2015 1:24 am, "Steve Grubb" <sgrubb at redhat.com<mailto:sgrubb at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> On Tuesday, December 15, 2015 05:13:14 AM Gulland, Scott A wrote:
> > I have a fairly common use case that I'm not sure is covered by the audit
> > library and I need some advice on how best to handle it.   I have a daemon
> > running as root that services REST API calls (or a web UI from a browser).
> > An external application first establishes a session by authenticating a
> > user which returns a token/session ID to the caller.   All future REST API
> > calls, supplies the token/session ID which allows them authenticated access
> > to the requested resource.   The token/session ID indicates what user the
> > request is associated with.  Obviously, there can be many users
> > simultaneously issuing requests.
> >
> > What I need to do is specify the user on each audit log call.   For example,
> > I need to have a way to specify which user is issuing the request when I
> > call audit_log_user_message().  Is this possible?   This is a very common
> > use case and really needs to be handled.
>
> Would these users be able to interact with the system in any way they please?
> If its not an interactive session, then I don't think its a _system_ event.
> There are perfectly fine application logging frameworks to choose from. The
> main issue is making sure that users cannot influence the records being written
> about what they are doing.
>
> But if you feel that you really would like to have this in the audit trail,
> then you can use the AUDIT_TRUSTED_APP event type and format the event any way
> that you wish. The audit tools sort of ignore those events because there's no
> telling what's in them.
>
> -Steve
>
Scott,

If you have to use auditd as your auditing framework, then can you
a. Test your application running on a system with a comprehensive autiting posture already deployed. That is take a CAPP configuration and add execve system call monitoring. I have found applications that extensively use auditd for application audit, slow down in such an environment.
b. If you use the auditd api then please use well formed key value pair content in your events. Follow the auditd documentation in this reguard. If not well formed, tools using auparse () and friends may discard data during the parsing.

We want to use the audit framework because after all, it is designed to track changes made to a system, and that is exactly what we want to do.  We definitely want to use well formed key-value pairs, but you’ve probably seem my post to Steve.   I don’t know what the “keys” I should be using or what the values for those keys should be.   I’m looking for information on these key-value pairs.  We need to follow the appropriate rules.

Scott
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