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# 17.5 Administering the Audit Subsystem

## 17.5.1 Viewing Audit Trails

Audit trails are stored in the BSM binary format, so tools must be used to modify or convert to text. The praudit(1) command converts trail files to a simple text format; the auditreduce(1) command may be used to reduce the audit trail file for analysis, archiving, or printing purposes. `auditreduce` supports a variety of selection parameters, including event type, event class, user, date or time of the event, and the file path or object acted on.

For example, the `praudit` utility will dump the entire contents of a specified audit log in plain text:

    # praudit /var/audit/AUDITFILE

Where ``AUDITFILE`` is the audit log to dump.

Audit trails consist of a series of audit records made up of tokens, which `praudit` prints sequentially one per line. Each token is of a specific type, such as `header` holding an audit record header, or `path` holding a file path from a name lookup. The following is an example of an `execve` event:

    header,133,10,execve(2),0,Mon Sep 25 15:58:03 2006, + 384 msec
    exec arg,finger,doug
    path,/usr/bin/finger
    attribute,555,root,wheel,90,24918,104944
    subject,robert,root,wheel,root,wheel,38439,38032,42086,128.232.9.100
    return,success,0
    trailer,133

This audit represents a successful `execve` call, in which the command `finger doug` has been run. The arguments token contains both the processed command line presented by the shell to the kernel. The `path` token holds the path to the executable as looked up by the kernel. The `attribute` token describes the binary, and in particular, includes the file mode which can be used to determine if the application was setuid. The `subject` token describes the subject process, and stores in sequence the audit user ID, effective user ID and group ID, real user ID and group ID, process ID, session ID, port ID, and login address. Notice that the audit user ID and real user ID differ: the user `robert` has switched to the `root` account before running this command, but it is audited using the original authenticated user. Finally, the `return` token indicates the successful execution, and the `trailer` concludes the record.

`praudit` also supports an XML output format, which can be selected using the `-x` argument.

## 17.5.2 Reducing Audit Trails

Since audit logs may be very large, an administrator will likely want to select a subset of records for using, such as records associated with a specific user:

    # auditreduce -u trhodes /var/audit/AUDITFILE | praudit

This will select all audit records produced for the user `trhodes` stored in the ``AUDITFILE`` file.

## 17.5.3 Delegating Audit Review Rights

Members of the `audit` group are given permission to read audit trails in `/var/audit`; by default, this group is empty, so only the `root` user may read audit trails. Users may be added to the `audit` group in order to delegate audit review rights to the user. As the ability to track audit log contents provides significant insight into the behavior of users and processes, it is recommended that the delegation of audit review rights be performed with caution.

## 17.5.4 Live Monitoring Using Audit Pipes

Audit pipes are cloning pseudo-devices in the device file system which allow applications to tap the live audit record stream. This is primarily of interest to authors of intrusion detection and system monitoring applications. However, for the administrator the audit pipe device is a convenient way to allow live monitoring without running into problems with audit trail file ownership or log rotation interrupting the event stream. To track the live audit event stream, use the following command line:

    # praudit /dev/auditpipe

By default, audit pipe device nodes are accessible only to the `root` user. To make them accessible to the members of the `audit` group, add a `devfs` rule to `devfs.rules`:

    add path 'auditpipe*' mode 0440 group audit

See devfs.rules(5) for more information on configuring the devfs file system.

> Warning: It is easy to produce audit event feedback cycles, in which the viewing of each audit event results in the generation of more audit events. For example, if all network I/O is audited, and praudit(1) is run from an SSH session, then a continuous stream of audit events will be generated at a high rate, as each event being printed will generate another event. It is advisable to run `praudit` on an audit pipe device from sessions without fine-grained I/O auditing in order to avoid this happening.

## 17.5.5 Rotating Audit Trail Files

Audit trails are written to only by the kernel, and managed only by the audit daemon, auditd. Administrators should not attempt to use newsyslog.conf(5) or other tools to directly rotate audit logs. Instead, the `audit` management tool may be used to shut down auditing, reconfigure the audit system, and perform log rotation. The following command causes the audit daemon to create a new audit log and signal the kernel to switch to using the new log. The old log will be terminated and renamed, at which point it may then be manipulated by the administrator.

    # audit -n

> Warning: If the auditd daemon is not currently running, this command will fail and an error message will be produced.

Adding the following line to `/etc/crontab` will force the rotation every twelve hours from cron(8):

    0     */12       *       *       *       root    /usr/sbin/audit -n

The change will take effect once you have saved the new `/etc/crontab`.

Automatic rotation of the audit trail file based on file size is possible via the `filesz` option in audit_control(5), and is described in the configuration files section of this chapter.

## 17.5.6 Compressing Audit Trails

As audit trail files can become very large, it is often desirable to compress or otherwise archive trails once they have been closed by the audit daemon. The `audit_warn` script can be used to perform customized operations for a variety of audit-related events, including the clean termination of audit trails when they are rotated. For example, the following may be added to the `audit_warn` script to compress audit trails on close:

    #
    # Compress audit trail files on close.
    #
    if [ "$1" = closefile ]; then
            gzip -9 $2
    fi

Other archiving activities might include copying trail files to a centralized server, deleting old trail files, or reducing the audit trail to remove unneeded records. The script will be run only when audit trail files are cleanly terminated, so will not be run on trails left unterminated following an improper shutdown.

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