Re: [RFC] Create an audit record of USB specific details

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2016 at 05:37:01PM -0400, Steve Grubb wrote:
> On Monday, April 04, 2016 12:02:42 AM wmealing wrote:
> > I'm looking to create an audit trail for when devices are added or removed
> > from the system.
> > 
> > The audit subsystem is a logging subsystem in kernel space that can be
> > used to create advanced filters on generated events.  It has partnered
> > userspace utilities ausearch, auditd, aureport, auditctl which work
> > exclusively on audit records.
> > 
> > These tools are able to set filters to "trigger" on specific in-kernel
> > events specified by privileged users.  While the userspace tools can create
> > audit events these are not able to be handled intelligently
> > (decoded,filtered or ignored) as kernel generated audit events are.
> > 
> > I have this working at the moment with the USB subsystem (as an example).
> > Its been suggested that I use systemd-udev however this means that the audit
> > tools (ausearch) will not be able to index these records.
> > 
> > Here is an example of picking out the AUDIT_DEVICE record type for example.
> > 
> > > # ausearch -l -i -ts today -m AUDIT_DEVICE
> > > ----
> > > type=AUDIT_DEVICE msg=audit(31/03/16 16:37:15.642:2) : action=add
> > > manufacturer=Linux 4.4.0-ktest ehci_hcd product=EHCI Host Controller
> > > serial=0000:00:06.7 major=189 minor=0 bus="usb"
> 
> About this event's format...we can't have any spaces in the value side of the 
> name=value fields unless its encoded as an untrusted string. You can replace 
> spaces with an underscore or dash for readability. So, manufacturer and 
> product would need this treatment.

What is the character encoding that audit messages can accept?  Does it
match up with the character encoding that USB strings are in?

thanks,

greg k-h