Re: Cooked audit log format

John Dennis
2008-05-12T16:12:34Z

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Steve Grubb wrote:
>> Strings should be either always hex encoded, or always escaped
>> (preferably the latter).
>>
>
> The issue that always dominates any thinking about the audit system is how to
> save diskspace. So, whenever a string has no naughty characters, we let it go
> as is. If the string contains something that will confuse the parser or do
> other bad things, we encode the string such that the parser cannot be
> confused. But we only do that on demand because the majority of strings are
> well-behaved.
>
This is not a true statement, unless the kernel has been patched
recently the handling of strings is seriously broken, a fact which has
been pointed out numerous times. It is also not true that parser cannot
be confused by the string format, also pointed out several times. It
should also be a goal that libraries other than auparse be capable of
parsing audit strings. It should also be a goal that correct parsing of
audit logs not be dependent on specific kernel versions.

The extra bytes in question would likely never exceed .01% of total file
size thus concerns about the extra bytes needed to properly escape a
string hogging disk space should not advanced in 2008 with large disks
and high bandwidth networks, reliable parsing trumps 1970's optimization
concerns.

--
John Dennis <jdennis@redhat.com>

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