multicast listeners and audit events to kmsg

Luca BRUNO lucab at redhat.com
Tue Apr 14 09:27:40 UTC 2020


Hi all,
I'm trying to re-spin a very old thread related to multicast listeners
and audit events to kmsg.

One surprising kernel behavior when using only a multicast listener
to collect audit events (in this case, systemd-journald) is that
audit events end up spamming the console [0].

[0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/15324

After a bunch of digging, it seems like this is due to a long-standing
RFE on the kernel side [1] (plus further references on BZ and LKML).

[1] https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-kernel/issues/102

Apparently there isn't a clear consensus on how this should be
approached. Looking at the github and bugzilla tickets, it seems to me
that Eric and Paul initially had in mind some logic based on multicast
listener detection, while Richard doesn't deem that reliable and
suggests an explicit configuration.

I'm not personally knowledgeable enough to judge kernel-land
approaches (nor to implement them), but I'd be happy if the audit folks
could converge to a consensus on how to implement this RFE, how it
would be consumed by userland, and what would be the kernel default
behavior once this RFE is implemented.

For Richard and the "explicit configuration" approach in particular, I'm
missing some further details:
 * Is the current behavior considered buggy, or is that intended to be
   kept as the default?
 * Would this be tweaked via a (boolean?) sysctl, and what would be the
   semantics of flipping it?
 * How would this play with namespacing, especially netns?

Ciao, Luca




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