warron.french <warron.french@gmail.com> wrote:

Anyway, my organization has a goal to audit several things; of which I know how to manage most, for examples:
...

Hi Warron. Have you looked at the various *.rules files that are shipped with the audit package? In RHEL/CentOS, you'll see:

~]# ls -1 /usr/share/doc/audit-2.4.1/*rules
/usr/share/doc/audit-2.4.1/capp.rules
/usr/share/doc/audit-2.4.1/lspp.rules
/usr/share/doc/audit-2.4.1/nispom.rules
/usr/share/doc/audit-2.4.1/stig.rules

These files already have example rules to do probably everything you're trying to do.

In newer versions, e.g., in Fedora, it gets even fancier:

~]# ls /usr/share/doc/audit/rules/
10-base-config.rules    32-power-abuse.rules
10-no-audit.rules       40-local.rules
11-loginuid.rules       41-containers.rules
12-cont-fail.rules      42-injection.rules
12-ignore-error.rules   43-module-load.rules
20-dont-audit.rules     70-einval.rules
21-no32bit.rules        71-networking.rules
22-ignore-chrony.rules 99-finalize.rules
30-nispom.rules         Makefile
30-pci-dss-v31.rules    Makefile.am
30-stig.rules           Makefile.in
31-privileged.rules     README-rules

These are also all well-documented examples. I think if you look through those, you'll find everything you're looking for.

warron.french <warron.french@gmail.com> wrote:

For these I would have used a watch (-w) rule and set the -p flags to r, w or a as shown above. From what I understand though, correct me if I am wrong Steve, we should be getting away from the watch rules and move towards Syscalls and using -F path=/path/to/file, or
-F path=/path/to/several_files/ -- is this correct, both for RHEL6 and RHEL7?

No. The simple -w syntax isn't going anywhere. My understanding: there's no performance hit for adding additional simple -w rules; whereas, you DO take a performance hit for each additional syscall-auditing rule line. Use watches if you can get away with the restrictive simplicity they offer; use syscall-rules when you need to.

warron.french <warron.french@gmail.com> wrote:

Also, I need to audit (Success/Failure) for the following sort of things:
Authentications
Logons
Logoffs

You can see examples of how to handle that in the rules the audit package ships with, e.g., from nispom:

## Audit 1, 1(b) Successful and unsuccessful logons and logoffs.
## This is covered by patches to login, gdm, and openssh
## Might also want to watch these files if needing extra information
#-w /var/log/tallylog -p wa -k logins
#-w /var/run/faillock/ -p wa -k logins
#-w /var/log/lastlog -p wa -k logins
#-w /var/log/btmp -p wa -k logins
#-w /var/run/utmp -p wa -k logins

Or from stig:

## (GEN002720-GEN002840: CAT II) (Previously – G100-G106) The SA will
## configure the auditing system to audit the following events for all
## users and root:
##
## - Logon (unsuccessful and successful) and logout (successful)
##
## Handled by pam, sshd, login, and gdm
## Might also want to watch these files if needing extra information
#-w /var/log/tallylog -p wa -k logins
#-w /var/run/faillock/ -p wa -k logins
#-w /var/log/lastlog -p wa -k logins

##- Process and session initiation (unsuccessful and successful)
##
## The session initiation is audited by pam without any rules needed.
## Might also want to watch this file if needing extra information
#-w /var/run/utmp -p wa -k session
#-w /var/log/btmp -p wa -k session
#-w /var/log/wtmp -p wa -k session

warron.french <warron.french@gmail.com> wrote:

Writes/downloads to external devices/media
Uploads from external devices/media (such as DvD, thumbdrive, etc)

You can audit mount syscalls, but that's not exactly fun on a modern system. In any case, in stig rules:

##- Export to media (successful)
## You have to mount media before using it. You must disable all automounting
## so that its done manually in order to get the correct user requesting the
## export
-a always,exit -F arch=b32 -S mount -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=4294967295 -F key=export
-a always,exit -F arch=b64 -S mount -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=4294967295 -F key=export

That said, the above example is assuming root login is disabled (requiring people login as their own user and su/sudo to root) ... but it's something. There was some discussion back in April cross-posted between the linux-audit, linux-usb, and linux-kernel mailing lists (subj: "[RFC] Create an audit record of USB specific details"). I think the usual approach is to just disable stuff from BIOS. I could imagine (as a band-aid) adding udev rules that generate audit events as well but I've never done it.

warron.french <warron.french@gmail.com> wrote:

User & Group events
User: Creation, deletion, Modification, suspending/locking
Group/Role: Creation, deletion, modification

Use of Privileged/Special Rights events (such as sudo, su, etc..)

Yep you'll find that in stig, nispom, etc.

warron.french <warron.french@gmail.com> wrote:

Printing to a print-device
Printing to a file

I would just completely remove CUPS ... or log use of lp/lpr commands.

Hope this helps get you on the right track.