V-252470

Discussion

The audit service must be configured to create log files with the correct permissions to prevent normal users from reading audit logs. Audit logs contain sensitive data about the system and about users. If log files are set to be readable and writable only by root or administrative users with sudo, the risk is mitigated.

Check Content

To check the permissions of the audit log files, run the following command:

/usr/bin/sudo ls -le $(/usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/grep '^dir' /etc/security/audit_control | awk -F: '{print $2}') | /usr/bin/grep -v current

The results should show the permissions (first column) to be "440" or less permissive.

If they do not, this is a finding.