Vulnerability Discussion
Without establishing the when, where, type, source, and outcome of events that occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack.
Without the capability to generate audit records, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.
Audit record content that may be necessary to satisfy this requirement includes, for example, time stamps, source and destination addresses, user/process identifiers, event descriptions, success/fail indications, filenames involved, and access control or flow control rules invoked.
Reconstruction of harmful events or forensic analysis is not possible if audit records do not contain enough information.
Successful incident response and auditing relies on timely, accurate system information and analysis in order to allow the organization to identify and respond to potential incidents in a proficient manner. If the operating system does not provide the ability to centrally review the operating system logs, forensic analysis is negatively impacted.
Associating event types with detected events in the Ubuntu operating system audit logs provides a means of investigating an attack; recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds; or identifying an improperly configured operating system.
Satisfies: SRG-OS-000122-GPOS-00063, SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000038-GPOS-00016, SRG-OS-000039-GPOS-00017, SRG-OS-000040-GPOS-00018, SRG-OS-000041-GPOS-00019, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00021, SRG-OS-000051-GPOS-00024, SRG-OS-000054-GPOS-00025, SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000337-GPOS-00129, SRG-OS-000348-GPOS-00136, SRG-OS-000349-GPOS-00137, SRG-OS-000350-GPOS-00138, SRG-OS-000351-GPOS-00139, SRG-OS-000352-GPOS-00140, SRG-OS-000353-GPOS-00141, SRG-OS-000354-GPOS-00142, SRG-OS-000475-GPOS-00220
Check
Verify the audit service is configured to produce audit records with the following command:
$ dpkg -l | grep auditd
If the "auditd" package is not installed, this is a finding.
Verify the audit service is enabled with the following command:
$ systemctl is-enabled auditd.service
If the command above returns "disabled", this is a finding.
Verify the audit service is properly running and active on the system with the following command:
$ systemctl is-active auditd.service
active
If the command above returns "inactive", this is a finding.
Fix
Configure the audit service to produce audit records containing the information needed to establish when (date and time) an event occurred.
Install the audit service (if the audit service is not already installed) with the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install auditd
Enable the audit service with the following command:
$ sudo systemctl enable auditd.service
To reload the rules file, issue the following command:
$ sudo augenrules --load