I am struggling here quite a bit trying to implement a ruleset to help us log PCI related events.  I was able to get a good ruleset that I am using successfully on RHEL5 which consists of the following rules:

 

-a exclude,always -F msgtype=CWD

-a exit,never -F arch=b32 -F path=/var/log/audit/audit.log

-a exit,never -F arch=b32 -F path=/var/log/messages

-a always,exit -F euid=0 -F perm=wxa -k ROOT_ACTION

-a exit,always -S all -F dir=/var/log -k LOG_ACCESS

-a exit,always -F arch=b32 -F dir=/var/log -S truncate -S unlink -S rename -S unlinkat -k LOGS_INIT

-a exit,always -F arch=b64 -F dir=/var/log -S truncate -S unlink -S rename -S unlinkat -k LOGS_INIT

-w /etc -p wa -k CONF_ACCESS

 

However, when I started deploying this I ran into some RHEL4 servers, and it appears the version of audit on the RHEL4 servers is 1.0.16.  This version doesn’t seem to like the rules above.  For example, the first rule results in the following:

 

Append rule - bad keyword exclude,always

 

Changing this rule to -a entry,never -F msgtype=CWD results in:

 

-F unknown field: msgtype=CWD

 

And -a always,exit -S all -F euid=0 -k ROOT_ACTION results in:

 

filterkey option needs a watch given prior to it

 

 

So clearly a lot has changed from this version to the version on the RHEL5 box (1.7.18).  Anyhow, since upgrading the RHEL4 boxes for this isn’t an option, I am trying to figure out what I can do to possibly modify these rules to work with the older version, or replace the older version with a newer version for the sake of this project.  From what I understand, the kernel on the RHEL4 box (2.6.9-103.EL) may not allow this since I understand that the versions of audit are generally kernel dependant.  Additionally, just looking at some of the dependencies on the audit-libs package on the RHEL4 box I am seeing that a lot of critical things depend on it (e.g. PAM, passwd, shadow-utils, openssh-server, etc.) so removing it and replacing it will likely be quite a mess.

 

If anyone has any input or suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.  Ideally, we shouldn’t have any RHEL4 boxes today, but the case is that we do, and they cannot be upgraded for the sake of this project, so creative solutions are welcomed, and encouraged.

 

Thanks!

-Pat

 

 

 

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Patrick Synor

Web Hosting Engineer

RouteOne

 

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