Regarding Auditing on RHEL 7.1

[Steve Grubb]

On Wednesday, February 24, 2016 07:04:08 AM Sarthak Jain wrote:
> I am Sarthak Jain working in MicroFocus. I want your small help to clarify
> one of my doubt regarding the kernel auditing on RHEL 7.1. I hope you are
> the right person to contact. It will just 2 min (max :P) to go through the
> problem.
> 
> Assumption: Ideally, if we change the configuration file (for ex-
> /etc/hosts), we should be getting audit events for it.
> 
> Scenario: By default, the permissions for '/etc/hosts' is (rw-r-r--). If we
> modify this file, then audit events are coming as attached in file -
> 'file1.txt'.
> 
> Problem: Let say if we change the permissions of the '/etc/hosts' to
> (rw-rw-rw), then audit system is not recording the "CONFIG_CHANGE" event at
> all.

That is because the audit configuration has not changed. Config change events 
are specific to changes in the audit system itself. What you get on this is 
syscall event with a path

If you want to get events on changing permissions on a file, then you would put 
a rule like this:

-a always,exit -F path=/etc/hosts -F perms=a -F key=permission-change

After modifying the file with chmod, then run:

ausearch --start today -k permission-change


> I have attached the file - 'file2.txt' for your reference. Can you
> please clarify this ? Is it a kernel level bug?

No. Its doing what it should.

-Steve