Thanks to Steve for
being our biggest target for questions on this list!
Has anyone talked
about sane ways to do offline analysis of Linux audit logs? Presumably,
this would be on another Linux system, but maybe not the same host, and probably
not on the same release or with the same username/IP address access.
Conceptually, ausearch would save and optionally read a system's "configuration"
to be saved for interpretation later.
My goal is central
logging, but doing the reporting/analysis on the central host. That way, I
can see a user across the Enterprise (or at least in the Linux hosts), but with
all the power of ausearch for refining the report. Ideally, I would do an
ausearch -ts <date> -te <date> --raw
--config-to=<hostname.ausearch.config> and it would do things like saving
the syscall lookup table, lookup users referenced in the reported audit trail,
and resolve IP addresses references in the reported audit trail. Maybe one
config file could be written for each data type in an existing format (e.g.
users in /etc/passwd format, hosts in /etc/hosts format, etc.). I'm mainly
after whether or not anyone has considered extending ausearch for this kind of
processing?
This way, an archive
of raw logs could be kept along with the exact system configuration which allows
offloading the audit trail analysis to a trusted location, rather than risk side
effects from a rootkit.
Charlie Todd
Ball
Aerospace & Technologies Corp.