Vulnerability Discussion

Information stored in one location is vulnerable to accidental or incidental deletion or alteration.

Off-loading is a common process in information systems with limited audit storage capacity.

One method of off-loading audit logs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is with the use of the audisp-remote dameon. When the remote buffer is full, audit logs will not be collected and sent to the central log server.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000342-GPOS-00133, SRG-OS-000479-GPOS-00224

Check

Verify the audisp daemon is configured to take an appropriate action when the internal queue is full:

# grep "overflow_action" /etc/audisp/audispd.conf

overflow_action = syslog

If the "overflow_action" option is not "syslog", "single", or "halt", or the line is commented out, ask the System Administrator to indicate how the audit logs are off-loaded to a different system or storage media, and to indicate what action that system takes when the internal queue is full.

If there is no evidence the system is configured to off-load audit logs to a different system or storage media or, if the configuration does not take appropriate action when the internal queue is full, this is a finding.

Fix

Edit the /etc/audisp/audispd.conf file and add or update the "overflow_action" option:

overflow_action = syslog

The audit daemon must be restarted for changes to take effect:

# service auditd restart