V-258839

Discussion

Protecting the integrity of the tools used for auditing purposes is a critical step toward ensuring the integrity of audit information. Audit information includes all information (e.g., audit records, audit settings, and audit reports) needed to successfully audit information system activity. Audit tools include, but are not limited to, vendor-provided and open source audit tools needed to successfully view and manipulate audit information system activity and records. Audit tools include custom queries and report generators. It is not uncommon for attackers to replace the audit tools or inject code into the existing tools with the purpose of providing the capability to hide or erase system activity from the audit logs. To address this risk, audit tools must be cryptographically signed in order to provide the capability to identify when the audit tools have been modified, manipulated, or replaced. An example is a checksum hash of the file or files.

Check Content

Use the verification capability of rpm to check the MD5 hashes of the audit files on disk versus the expected ones from the installation package.

At the command line, run the following command:

# rpm -V audit | grep "^..5"

Example output:

S.5....T.  c /etc/audit/auditd.conf

If there is any output for files that are not configuration files, this is a finding.