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). "Setxattr" is a system call used to set an extended attribute value.

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 if RHEL 8 is configured to audit the execution of the "setxattr" system call, by running the following command:

$ sudo grep -w setxattr /etc/audit/audit.rules

-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S setxattr -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k perm_mod
-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S setxattr -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k perm_mod

-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S setxattr -F auid=0 -k perm_mod
-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S setxattr -F auid=0 -k perm_mod

If the command does not return all lines, or the lines are commented out, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure RHEL 8 to audit the execution of the "setxattr" system call, by adding or updating the following lines to "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules":

-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S setxattr -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k perm_mod
-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S setxattr -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k perm_mod

-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S setxattr -F auid=0 -k perm_mod
-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S setxattr -F auid=0 -k perm_mod

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