Successful/unsuccessful uses of userhelper in RHEL 8 must generate an audit record.

STIG ID: RHEL-08-030315  |  SRG: SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031 |  Severity: medium |  CCI: CCI-000169 |  Vulnerability Id: V-230431 | 

Vulnerability Discussion

Reconstruction of harmful events or forensic analysis is not possible if audit records do not contain enough information.

At a minimum, the organization must audit the full-text recording of privileged commands. The organization must maintain audit trails in sufficient detail to reconstruct events to determine the cause and impact of compromise. The "userhelper" command is not intended to be run interactively. "Userhelper" provides a basic interface to change a user's password, gecos information, and shell. The main difference between this program and its traditional equivalents (passwd, chfn, chsh) is that prompts are written to standard out to make it easy for a graphical user interface wrapper to interface to it as a child process.

When a user logs on, the AUID is set to the UID of the account that is being authenticated. Daemons are not user sessions and have the loginuid set to "-1". The AUID representation is an unsigned 32-bit integer, which equals "4294967295". The audit system interprets "-1", "4294967295", and "unset" in the same way.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000462-GPOS-00206, SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00215

Check

Verify that an audit event is generated for any successful/unsuccessful use of "userhelper" by performing the following command to check the file system rules in "/etc/audit/audit.rules":

$ sudo grep -w "userhelper" /etc/audit/audit.rules

-a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/userhelper -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-unix-update

If the command does not return a line, or the line is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the audit system to generate an audit event for any successful/unsuccessful uses of the "userhelper" by adding or updating the following rule in the "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules" file:

-a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/userhelper -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-unix-update

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