Weird issues in 2.6.5

[Steve Grubb]

On Wednesday, July 13, 2016 9:22:57 AM EDT Chris Nandor wrote:
> Secondary question: the reason for what I'm working on is that we want to
> be able to audit what folks do as root on our production hosts.  We're not
> a bank, and a perfect solution is not required, but we do need to be able
> to take reasonable steps to find out if people with access are doing bad
> things.
> 
> Is this setup reasonable for that purpose?

Yes. You would want to do two things, first enable tty auditing. This is done 
by the pam_tty_audit module. Second consider adding the 32-power-abuse.rules 
to your rules.

> I know that's a loaded question
> and I can answer any questions anyone has that are necessary to figure this
> out.  I am not asking so much about rules, but about architecture: logging
> according to whatever rules we set up, to the local audit.log and
> immediately to a remote using audisp-remote, so the log can't be easily
> manipulated.

Remote logging is the defence against local log manipulation.

-Steve

> On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 8:57 AM, Steve Grubb <sgrubb at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 13, 2016 8:47:58 AM EDT Chris Nandor wrote:
> > > Hi, I had some odd behavior to report.
> > > 
> > > I am running ubuntu 12.04.  Using the default auditd and audispd-plugins
> > > packages for my release, I was able to get logs sent to local syslog and
> > 
> > to
> > 
> > > a remote auditd server (same basic configuration), but the entries were
> > > being buffered somewhere (I think on the client side), and if the server
> > > died reconnections didn't happen.
> > > 
> > > So, I wanted a more recent version, so I compiled audit-userspace from
> > 
> > the
> > 
> > > github src mirror,* trunk at 1341.
> > 
> > The github repo is a mirror of svn and is not always up to date. The issue
> > you
> > are seeing is fixed in the next commit after the mirror stops.
> > 
> > https://fedorahosted.org/audit/changeset/1342
> > 
> > if you want the lastest you can:
> > 
> > svn co http://svn.fedorahosted.org/svn/audit/trunk
> > 
> > and then generate from there. I am planning to release audit-2.6.5
> > tomorrow.
> > So, if anyone can test the current code, I'd really appreciate it. I'm
> > hoping
> > the next release settles down the audit code.
> > 
> > > When I did, I got some weird results.  For example, I expected got
> > > 
> > > something like this in my audit.log:
> > >   node=host.example.com type=CWD msg=audit(1468363871.644:3279856):
> > >  cwd="/etc/audisp"
> > > 
> > > And that was as expected.  In syslog, I expected to get:
> > >   Jul 13 08:34:53 host audispd: node=host.loc.example.com type=CWD
> > > 
> > > msg=audit(1468363871.644:3279856):  cwd="/etc/audisp"
> > > 
> > > But instead, I got:
> > >   Jul 13 08:34:53 host audispd: type=CWD msg=node=host.loc.example.com
> > > 
> > > type=CWD msg=audit(1468363871.644
> > > 
> > > As you can see, the whole thing was prepended with "type=CWD msg=", and
> > 
> > the
> > 
> > > line was truncated.  Similarly, on the remote host, I got the same 
thing:
> > >   type=CWD msg=node=host.loc.example.com type=CWD
> > 
> > msg=audit(1468363871.644
> > 
> > > I noticed that the most recent version of the src for ubuntu was 2.4.5,
> > 
> > so
> > 
> > > I grabbed the src tarball from packages.ubuntu and built it, and now
> > > everything looks fine.  The exact same line I see in my audit.log shows
> > 
> > up
> > 
> > > in the remote audit.log, with no buffering.  When I restart the remote
> > > auditd server or client, it reconnects.  syslog has same entry
> > > (prepended
> > > with the timestamp etc.).  Everything seems happy now.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > *For some reason I had to define `CC_FOR_BUILD=gcc` in my shell when I
> > 
> > ran
> > 
> > > `make` from the svn/git src.  I did not require this when building 2.4.5
> > > from the ubuntu src.
> > 
> > I think that should have been detected during configure.
> > 
> > -Steve