RHEL 9 audit system must protect auditing rules from unauthorized change.

Documentable No

Rule ID SV-258229r958434_rule

CCI References

CCI-000162CCI-000163CCI-000164

Discussion

Unauthorized disclosure of audit records can reveal system and configuration data to attackers, thus compromising its confidentiality. Audit information includes all information (e.g., audit records, audit settings, audit reports) needed to successfully audit RHEL 9 system activity. In immutable mode, unauthorized users cannot execute changes to the audit system to potentially hide malicious activity and then put the audit rules back. A system reboot would be noticeable, and a system administrator could then investigate the unauthorized changes. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000057-GPOS-00027, SRG-OS-000058-GPOS-00028, SRG-OS-000059-GPOS-00029

Check Procedure

Verify the audit system prevents unauthorized changes with the following command:

$ sudo grep "^\s*[^#]" /etc/audit/audit.rules | tail -1

-e 2

If the audit system is not set to be immutable by adding the "-e 2" option to the end of "/etc/audit/audit.rules", this is a finding.

Fix Action

Configure the audit system to set the audit rules to be immutable by adding the following line to end of "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules"

-e 2

The audit daemon must be restarted for the changes to take effect.