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V-256521

CAT II (Medium)

The Photon operating system must initiate auditing as part of the boot process.

Rule ID

SV-256521r991555_rule

STIG

VMware vSphere 7.0 vCenter Appliance Photon OS Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V1R4

CCIs

CCI-001464

Discussion

Each process on the system carries an "auditable" flag, which indicates whether its activities can be audited. Although auditd takes care of enabling this for all processes that launch after it starts, adding the kernel argument ensures the flag is set at boot for every process on the system. This includes processes created before auditd starts.

Check Content

At the command line, run the following command:

# grep "audit=1" /proc/cmdline

If no results are returned, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Navigate to and open:

/boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Locate the boot command line arguments. An example follows:

linux /$photon_linux root=$rootpartition $photon_cmdline $systemd_cmdline

Add "audit=1" to the end of the line so it reads as follows:

linux /$photon_linux root=$rootpartition $photon_cmdline $systemd_cmdline audit=1

Note: Do not copy/paste in this example argument line. This may change in future releases. Find the similar line and append "audit=1" to it.

Reboot the system for the change to take effect.