1AUDIT.RULES:(7)         System Administration Utilities        AUDIT.RULES:(7)
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NAME

6       audit.rules - a set of rules loaded in the kernel audit system
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DESCRIPTION

9       audit.rules is a file containing audit rules that will be loaded by the
10       audit daemon's init script whenever the daemon is started. The auditctl
11       program  is used by the initscripts to perform this operation. The syn‐
12       tax for the rules is essentially the same as when typing in an auditctl
13       command  at  a shell prompt except you do not need to type the auditctl
14       command name since that is implied. The audit rules  come  in  3  vari‐
15       eties: control, file, and syscall.
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17
18   Control
19       Control  commands generally involve configuring the audit system rather
20       than telling it what to watch for.  These  commands  typically  include
21       deleting  all  rules,  setting  the size of the kernel's backlog queue,
22       setting the failure mode, setting the event  rate  limit,  or  to  tell
23       auditctl  to  ignore  syntax  errors in the rules and continue loading.
24       Generally, these rules are at the top of the rules file.
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26
27   File System
28       File System rules are sometimes called watches. These rules are used to
29       audit  access to particular files or directories that you may be inter‐
30       ested in. If the path given in a watch rule is a  directory,  then  the
31       rule  used  is  recursive to the bottom of the directory tree excluding
32       any directories that may be mount points. The  syntax  of  these  watch
33       rules generally follow this format:
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35       -w path-to-file -p permissions -k keyname
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37       where the permission are any one of the following:
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39
40              r - read of the file
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42              w - write to the file
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44              x - execute the file
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46              a - change in the file's attribute
47
48       Watches  can  also  be created using the syscall format described below
49       which allow for greater flexibility and options.  Using  syscall  rules
50       you  can  choose between path and dir which is against a specific inode
51       or directory tree respectively. It should also be noted that the recur‐
52       sive directory watch will stop if there is a mount point below the par‐
53       ent directory. There is an option  to  make  the  mounted  subdirectory
54       equivalent by using a -q rule.
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56
57   System Call
58       The system call rules are loaded into a matching engine that intercepts
59       each syscall that all programs on the system  makes.  Therefore  it  is
60       very  important  to only use syscall rules when you have to since these
61       affect performance. The more rules, the bigger the performance hit. You
62       can  help  the performance, though, by combining syscalls into one rule
63       whenever possible.
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65       The Linux kernel has 4 rule matching lists or filters as they are some‐
66       times called. They are: task, exit, user, and exclude. The task list is
67       checked only during the fork or clone syscalls. It is  rarely  used  in
68       practice.
69
70       The  exit  filter  is the place where all syscall and file system audit
71       requests are evaluated.
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73       The user filter is used to filter (remove) some events  that  originate
74       in  user  space.   By  default,  any event originating in user space is
75       allowed. So, if there are some events that you do not want to see, then
76       this  is  a place where some can be removed. See auditctl(8) for fields
77       that are valid.
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79       The exclude filter is used to exclude certain events from  being  emit‐
80       ted.  The  msgtype and a number of subject attribute fields can be used
81       to tell the kernel which message types you do not want to record.  This
82       filter  can  remove the event as a whole and is not selective about any
83       other attribute. The user and exit filters are better suited to  selec‐
84       tively  auditing  events.   The  action  is  ignored  for  this filter,
85       defaulting to "never".
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87       Syscall rules take the general form of:
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89       -a action,list -S syscall -F field=value -k keyname
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91       The -a option tells the kernel's rule matching engine that we  want  to
92       append a rule at the end of the rule list. But we need to specify which
93       rule list it goes on and what action to take when  it  triggers.  Valid
94       actions are:
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96
97              always - always create an event
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99              never  - never create an event
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101       The  action  and list are separated by a comma but no space in between.
102       Valid lists are: task, exit,  user,  and  exclude.  Their  meaning  was
103       explained earlier.
104
105       Next in the rule would normally be the -S option. This field can either
106       be the syscall name or number. For  readability,  the  name  is  almost
107       always used. You may give more than one syscall in a rule by specifying
108       another -S option. When sent into the kernel, all  syscall  fields  are
109       put  into a mask so that one compare can determine if the syscall is of
110       interest. So, adding multiple syscalls in one rule is  very  efficient.
111       When you specify a syscall name, auditctl will look up the name and get
112       its syscall number. This leads to some problems  on  bi-arch  machines.
113       The  32  and 64 bit syscall numbers sometimes, but not always, line up.
114       So, to solve this problem, you would generally need to break  the  rule
115       into  2  with  one  specifying  -F arch=b32 and the other specifying -F
116       arch=b64. This needs to go in front of the -S option so  that  auditctl
117       looks at the right lookup table when returning the number.
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119       After  the syscall is specified, you would normally have one or more -F
120       options that fine tune what to match against. Rather than list all  the
121       valid field types here, the reader should look at the auditctl man page
122       which has a full listing of each field and  what  it  means.  But  it's
123       worth mentioning a couple things.
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125       The  audit system considers uids to be unsigned numbers. The audit sys‐
126       tem uses the number -1 to indicate that a loginuid  is  not  set.  This
127       means  that  when  it's  printed  out, it looks like 4294967295. If you
128       write a rule that you wanted try to get the valid users of the  system,
129       you  need  to look in /etc/login.defs to see where user accounts start.
130       For example, if UID_MIN is  500, then you would also need to take  into
131       account  that  the unsigned representation of -1 is higher than 500. So
132       you would address this with the following piece of a rule:
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134       -F auid>=500 -F auid!=4294967295
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136       These individual checks are "anded" and both have to be true.
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138       The last thing to know about syscall rules is that you can  add  a  key
139       field  which is a free form text string that you want inserted into the
140       event to help identify its meaning. This is discussed in more detail in
141       the NOTES section.
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143

NOTES

145       The  purpose  of auditing is to be able to do an investigation periodi‐
146       cally or whenever an incident occurs. A few simple steps in planning up
147       front will make this job easier. The best advice is to use keys in both
148       the watches and system call rules to give the rule a meaning. If  rules
149       are  related  or together meet a specific requirement, then give them a
150       common key name. You can use this during your investigation  to  select
151       only results with a specific meaning.
152
153       When doing an investigation, you would normally start off with the main
154       aureport output to just get an idea about what is happening on the sys‐
155       tem.  This  report mostly tells you about events that are hard coded by
156       the audit system such as  login/out,  uses  of  authentication,  system
157       anomalies, how many users have been on the machine, and if SE Linux has
158       detected any AVCs.
159
160       aureport --start this-week
161
162       After looking at the report, you probably want to  get  a  second  view
163       about  what  rules  you loaded that have been triggering. This is where
164       keys become important. You would generally run the key  summary  report
165       like this:
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167       aureport --start this-week --key --summary
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169       This  will  give  an  ordered listing of the keys associated with rules
170       that have been triggering. If, for example, you  had  a  syscall  audit
171       rule  that triggered on the failure to open files with EPERM that had a
172       key field of access like this:
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174       -a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S open -S openat -F exit=-EPERM -k access
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176       Then you can isolate these failures with ausearch and pipe the  results
177       to  aureport  for  display. Suppose your investigation noticed a lot of
178       the access denied events. If you wanted to see the files that  unautho‐
179       rized access has been attempted, you could run the following command:
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181       ausearch --start this-week -k access --raw | aureport --file --summary
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183       This  will  give an ordered list showing which files are being accessed
184       with the EPERM failure. Suppose you wanted to see which users might  be
185       having failed access, you would run the following command:
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187       ausearch --start this-week -k access --raw | aureport --user --summary
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189       If  your  investigation showed a lot of failed accesses to a particular
190       file, you could run the following report to see who is doing it:
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192       ausearch --start this-week -k access -f /path-to/file --raw |  aureport
193       --user -i
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195       This  report will give you the individual access attempts by person. If
196       you needed to see the actual audit event that is  being  reported,  you
197       would look at the date, time, and event columns. Assuming the event was
198       822 and it occurred at 2:30 on 09/01/2009 and you  use  the  en_US.utf8
199       locale, the command would look something like this:
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201       ausearch --start 09/01/2009 02:30 -a 822 -i --just-one
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203       This will select the first event from that day and time with the match‐
204       ing event id and interpret the numeric values into human readable  val‐
205       ues.
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207       The  most  important  step in being able to do this kind of analysis is
208       setting up key fields when the rules were originally written. It should
209       also  be  pointed out that you can have more than one key field associ‐
210       ated with any given rule.
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212

TROUBLESHOOTING

214       If you are not getting events on  syscall  rules  that  you  think  you
215       should, try running a test program under strace so that you can see the
216       syscalls. There is a chance that you might have  identified  the  wrong
217       syscall.
218
219       If  you get a warning from auditctl saying, "32/64 bit syscall mismatch
220       in line XX, you should specify an arch". This means that you  specified
221       a  syscall  rule  on a bi-arch system where the syscall has a different
222       syscall number for the 32 and 64 bit interfaces. This means that on one
223       of those interfaces you are likely auditing the wrong syscall. To solve
224       the problem, re-write the rule as two  rules  specifying  the  intended
225       arch for each rule. For example,
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227       -always,exit -S openat -k access
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229       would be rewritten as
230
231       -always,exit -F arch=b32 -S openat -k access
232       -always,exit -F arch=b64 -S openat -k access
233
234       If  you  get  a warning that says, "entry rules deprecated, changing to
235       exit rule". This means that you have a rule intended for the entry fil‐
236       ter,  but  that filter is no longer available. Auditctl moved your rule
237       to the exit filter so that it's not lost. But to solve this so that you
238       do  not get the warning any more, you need to change the offending rule
239       from entry to exit.
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241

EXAMPLES

243       The following rule shows how to audit failed access  to  files  due  to
244       permission  problems. Note that it takes two rules for each arch ABI to
245       audit this since file access can fail with two different failure  codes
246       indicating permission problems.
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248       -a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S open -S openat -F exit=-EACCES -k access
249       -a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S open -S openat -F exit=-EPERM -k access
250       -a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S open -S openat -F exit=-EACCES -k access
251       -a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S open -S openat -F exit=-EPERM -k access
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253

HARD WIRED EVENTS

255       If  auditing  is enabled, then you can get any event that is not caused
256       by syscall or file watch  rules  (because  you  don't  have  any  rules
257       loaded). So, that means, any event from 1100-1299, 1326, 1328, 1331 and
258       higher can be emitted. The reason that there are  a  number  of  events
259       that  are  hardwired is because they are required by regulatory compli‐
260       ance and  are  sent  automatically  as  a  convenience.  (For  example,
261       logon/logoff  is  a  mandatory  event in all security guidance.) If you
262       don't want this, you can use the exclude filter to drop events that you
263       do not want.
264
265       -a always,exclude -F msgtype=CRED_REFR
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267

SEE ALSO

269       auditctl(8), auditd(8).
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AUTHOR

273       Steve Grubb
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277Red Hat                            Jan 2019                    AUDIT.RULES:(7)
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