Vulnerability Discussion

Without the capability to restrict which roles and individuals can select which events are audited, unauthorized personnel may be able to prevent the auditing of critical events.

Misconfigured audits may degrade the system's performance by overwhelming the audit log. Misconfigured audits may also make it more difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

Check

Verify that "/etc/audit/audit.rules", "/etc/audit/auditd.conf", and "/etc/audit/rules.d/*" files have a mode of "640" or less permissive by using the following command:

$ sudo ls -al /etc/audit/audit.rules /etc/audit/auditd.conf /etc/audit/rules.d/* | awk '{print $1, $9}'
-rw-r----- /etc/audit/audit.rules
-rw-r----- /etc/audit/auditd.conf
-rw-r----- /etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules

If "/etc/audit/audit.rules", "/etc/audit/auditd.conf", or "/etc/audit/rules.d/*" files have a mode more permissive than "640", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure /etc/audit/audit.rules", "/etc/audit/auditd.conf", and "/etc/audit/rules.d/*" files to have a mode of "640" by using the following command:

$ sudo chmod -R 640 /etc/audit/audit.rules /etc/audit/auditd.conf /etc/audit/rules.d/*