audit — Security Event Audit
Contents
Bugs
The FreeBSD kernel does not fully validate that audit records submitted by user applications are
syntactically valid BSM; as submission of records is limited to privileged processes, this is not a
critical bug.
Instrumentation of auditable events in the kernel is not complete, as some system calls do not generate
audit records, or generate audit records with incomplete argument information.
Mandatory Access Control (MAC) labels, as provided by the mac(4) facility, are not audited as part of
records involving MAC decisions.
Currently the audit syscalls are not supported for jailed processes. However, if a process has audit
session state associated with it, audit records will still be produced and a zonename token containing
the jail's ID or name will be present in the audit records.
Debian April 28, 2019 AUDIT(4)
Description
Security Event Audit is a facility to provide fine-grained, configurable logging of security-relevant
events, and is intended to meet the requirements of the Common Criteria (CC) Common Access Protection
Profile (CAPP) evaluation. The FreeBSD audit facility implements the de facto industry standard BSM API,
file formats, and command line interface, first found in the Solaris operating system. Information on
the user space implementation can be found in libbsm(3).
Audit support is enabled at boot, if present in the kernel, using an rc.conf(5) flag. The audit daemon,
auditd(8), is responsible for configuring the kernel to perform audit, pushing configuration data from
the various audit configuration files into the kernel.
AuditSpecialDevice
The kernel audit facility provides a special device, /dev/audit, which is used by auditd(8) to monitor
for audit events, such as requests to cycle the log, low disk space conditions, and requests to terminate
auditing. This device is not intended for use by applications.
AuditPipeSpecialDevices
Audit pipe special devices, discussed in auditpipe(4), provide a configurable live tracking mechanism to
allow applications to tee the audit trail, as well as to configure custom preselection parameters to
track users and events in a fine-grained manner.
DTraceAuditProvider
The DTrace Audit Provider, dtaudit(4), allows D scripts to enable capture of in-kernel audit records for
kernel audit event types, and then process their contents during audit commit or BSM generation.
History
The OpenBSM implementation was created by McAfee Research, the security division of McAfee Inc., under
contract to Apple Computer Inc. in 2004. It was subsequently adopted by the TrustedBSD Project as the
foundation for the OpenBSM distribution.
Support for kernel audit first appeared in FreeBSD 6.2.
Name
audit — Security Event Audit
See Also
auditreduce(1), praudit(1), audit(2), auditctl(2), auditon(2), getaudit(2), getauid(2), poll(2), select(2), setaudit(2), setauid(2), libbsm(3), auditpipe(4), dtaudit(4), audit.log(5), audit_class(5), audit_control(5), audit_event(5), audit_user(5), audit_warn(5), rc.conf(5), audit(8), auditd(8), auditdistd(8)
Synopsis
optionsAUDIT
