Audit of physical users

Audit of physical users

[Maupertuis Philippe]

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I have a requirement to trace the activity of the physical users on  Redhat 5/6 systems.
I spent the last week sifting through  the archive to find that the question was asked time and again.
The basic rule is easy but the hitch is when an administrator restarts a service.
Unfortunately, it seems there is no solution until systemd is used to start daemon instead of service.
The only useful thing I found was in this old post from 2007 http://www.redhat.com/archives/linux-audit/2007-February/msg00071.html to reset the auid.
I would like to know if it can be used with the current version of auditd.
If yes, I will probably give it a try with a fixed dedicated auid to clearly state that the auid was changed.
Do I need to install something besides audit and audit-libs ?
Is there any special need, for compiling this program ?

Thanks
Philippe





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Re: Audit of physical users

[Steve Grubb]

On Monday, September 02, 2013 02:49:28 PM Maupertuis Philippe wrote:
> I have a requirement to trace the activity of the physical users on  Redhat
> 5/6 systems. I spent the last week sifting through  the archive to find
> that the question was asked time and again. The basic rule is easy but the
> hitch is when an administrator restarts a service. Unfortunately, it seems
> there is no solution until systemd is used to start daemon instead of
> service.

Depending on how ambitious you are, you can write a little C program that 
opens /proc/self/loginuid and writes -1, then close, and execve the intended 
program. You will still have a sessionid that is not -1, but you have a 
solution. At the same time, it also means that admins could use the same tool 
to bypass audit rules. So, you'd probably want to think about it a bit.

> The only useful thing I found was in this old post from 2007
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/linux-audit/2007-February/msg00071.html to
> reset the auid. I would like to know if it can be used with the current
> version of auditd.

Probably, but you don't really need to link against libaudit. If you looked at 
the source to audit_setloginuid(), its just open /proc/self/loginuid and 
writing to it.

> If yes, I will probably give it a try with a fixed
> dedicated auid to clearly state that the auid was changed. Do I need to
> install something besides audit and audit-libs ?
> Is there any special need, for compiling this program ?

I'd simplify.

-Steve