V-274524

Discussion

Without establishing what type of event occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident, or identify those responsible for one. Audit record content that may be necessary to satisfy the requirement of this policy includes, for example, time stamps, source and destination addresses, user/process identifiers, event descriptions, success/fail indications, filenames involved, and access control or flow control rules invoked. Associating event types with detected events in the application and audit logs provides a means of investigating an attack; recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds; or identifying an improperly configured application. Monitor the usage of API keys to detect any anomalies.

Check Content

Verify the API generates audit records of what type of events occurred.

1. Inspect the API’s configuration settings and verify logging is enabled and audit records are being generated for key events such as authentication, authorization, data access, and errors.

2. Make a valid API request and verify successful events are logged.

3. Simulate system errors under specific conditions (e.g., database unavailability, timeout errors, internal exceptions).

4. Check the audit or access logs in the API or logging platform (e.g., AWS CloudWatch, Splunk, ELK stack). Verify that the logs contain entries for the triggered events.

5. Inspect the log entries for the following:
- Event Type: Look for the event’s description or category (e.g., authentication attempt, data access, system error).

If the API does not generate audit records for the type of event, this is a finding.