Getting the value of a syscall's memory address argument - setxattr

Alan Evangelista alan.vitor at gmail.com
Sat Feb 27 01:17:00 UTC 2021


Each syscall has some arguments and the Linux Audit framework logs each
pointer argument as a memory address instead of its values. For instance,
when tracking the setxattr syscall, I get its arguments in the following
format:

"a0":"55f3604ba000"
"a1":"7f1b0bd342fd"
"a2":"55f3604d9b20"
"a3":"38"

According to https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/setxattr.2.html, a0 is
the file path's starting memory address, a1 is the extended attribute
name's starting memory address, a2 is the extended attribute
value's starting memory address and a3 is the size in bytes of the extended
attribute value.

Is it safe to access those memory addresses in order to get their values? I
guess not because their content may have been overwritten between the time
the syscall log entry was generated by the kernel and the time it's
consumed by a Linux Audit client. If indeed it's unsafe to access these
memory addresses, is there any other way to get the extended attribute
name/value in the setxattr syscall using the Linux Audit framework?

My specific use case: I'm using Auditbeat/Linux Audit to track permission
changes done to a disk partition which is mounted by Samba on a Windows
Server box. When a Windows user changes permissions of a file in the Samba
mount, Linux Audit records a setxattr event and Auditbeat (connected to the
kernel's Audit framework via netlink) notifies me of the event. I need to
know what permission changes the user has done in the file and AFAIK
parsing the ext attrib name/value is the only way to do that.

Thanks in advance.
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