Vulnerability Discussion

The audit service must be configured to shut down the computer if it is unable to audit system events.

Once audit failure occurs, user and system activity are no longer recorded, and malicious activity could go undetected. Audit processing failures can occur due to software/hardware errors, failures in the audit capturing mechanisms, and audit storage capacity being reached or exceeded.

Check

Verify the macOS system is configured to shut down upon audit failure with the following command:

/usr/bin/awk -F':' '/^policy/ {print $NF}' /etc/security/audit_control | /usr/bin/tr ',' '\n' | /usr/bin/grep -Ec 'ahlt'

If the result is not "1", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the macOS system to shut down upon audit failure with the following command:

/usr/bin/sed -i.bak 's/^policy.*/policy: ahlt,argv/' /etc/security/audit_control; /usr/sbin/audit -s