Vulnerability Discussion

Without generating audit records that are specific to the security and mission needs of the organization, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

Audit records can be generated from various components within the information system (e.g., module or policy filter).

The system call rules are loaded into a matching engine that intercepts each syscall made by all programs on the system. Therefore, it is very important to use syscall rules only when absolutely necessary since these affect performance. The more rules, the bigger the performance hit. The performance can be helped, however, by combining syscalls into one rule whenever possible.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00216, SRG-OS-000477-GPOS-00222

Check

Verify the operating system generates audit records upon successful/unsuccessful attempts to use the "init_module" and "finit_module" syscalls.

Check the auditing rules in "/etc/audit/audit.rules" with the following command:

$ sudo grep init_module /etc/audit/audit.rules

-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S init_module,finit_module -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k modulechange

-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S init_module,finit_module -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k modulechange

If both the "b32" and "b64" audit rules are not defined for the "init_module" and "finit_module" syscalls, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the operating system to generate audit records upon successful/unsuccessful attempts to use the "init_module" and "finit_module" syscalls.

Add or update the following rules in "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules":

-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S init_module,finit_module -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k modulechange

-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S init_module,finit_module -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k modulechange

The audit daemon must be restarted for the changes to take effect.