Re: [PATCH] database audit integration (Re: Some ideas in SE-PostgreSQL enhancement)

[John Dennis <jdennis@redhat.com>]

KaiGai Kohei wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a developer of SE-PostgreSQL which is an enhancement of
> database security using SELinux. It enables to apply the
> security policy of the operating system on accesses to
> database objects also.
> It makes an access control decision and audit messages, but
> these are not written out to system audit mechanism.
>
> I believe our preferable behavior is the system audit collects
> all the audit messages come from SELinux, not a logfile of
> PostgreSQL.
>
> Currently, the audit-libs has an interface to write a message
> come from userspace avc, but some of parameter is not suitable
> for the reference monitor in database management system.
>   
In the past it has been stated the kernel audit system is not
appropriate for general application logging because the kernel audit
system is not easily extensible and is not the place to log general
application data. While it is true the kernel audit system does allow
for some user level application logging by design and intention it is
constrained to select events deemed worthy of exception.

There is a new project called IPA (Identity, Policy, Audit) under
development. IPA v1 has been released, but the initial v1 release
focused only on the "I" part of IPA. In v2 we plan on filling out the
"P" and "A" parts. One of the things we're introducing for the Audit
component is a library called ELAPI (Event Logging API) which allows
applications to generate logging event data which is recursively
structured with key/value pairs (which can also be reformatted into
traditional strings). The library is capable of "dispatching" the
structured events to a variety of destination "sinks" (i.e. syslog,
file, IPA central logging repository, etc.). The destination sink
processing is accomplished with loadable plugin's so it should be easy
to to support any destination you want once you start utilizing the
ELAPI to log information. We had been planning on adding the kernel
audit system as a possible destination sink until the philosophy in the
above paragraph was pointed out to us.

ELAPI can be installed independent of IPA. I just went looking for
external documentation on ELAPI but it appears as though the ELAPI
documentation is only on a non-public wiki at the moment. I will try to
get that issue fixed shortly. ELAPI is still in development, although I
would say it's reaching the point of an alpha release.

Thus you may want to consider ELAPI for logging Secure Postgresql
messages and we would be interested in having you as a third party
review and exercise the library.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis@redhat.com>

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