Currently ppid filtering on syscall auditing does not appear to work. An easy reproducer would be to do the following: touch ./test auditctl -a entry,always -S chmod -F ppid=[pid of your shell] chmod 000 ./test no audit record will appear! (although !=[pid of your shell] will show all chmod commands from all processes regardless of the ppid) With a little instrumentation I found that ctx->ppid == 0 inside audit_filter_rules(). I originally wanted to set the ppid during the context creation back in something like audit_alloc_context but that didn't work. Because at that point the new process had not forked off so the ppid of the chmod process was actually it's parents parents. Instead I set the ppid in audit_syscall_entry when we are actually building the specific context. After some looking I did not see a way to get into audit_log_exit without having set the ppid. So I am dropping the set from there and only doing it at the beginning. Please comment/ack/nak as soon as possible. -Eric kernel/auditsc.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) --- linux-2.6.18.i686/kernel/auditsc.c.orig 2006-09-27 21:53:44.000000000 -0400 +++ linux-2.6.18.i686/kernel/auditsc.c 2006-09-28 15:51:44.000000000 -0400 @@ -795,7 +795,6 @@ static void audit_log_exit(struct audit_ /* tsk == current */ context->pid = tsk->pid; - context->ppid = sys_getppid(); /* sic. tsk == current in all cases */ context->uid = tsk->uid; context->gid = tsk->gid; context->euid = tsk->euid; @@ -1116,6 +1115,7 @@ void audit_syscall_entry(int arch, int m context->arch = arch; context->major = major; + context->ppid = sys_getppid(); context->argv[0] = a1; context->argv[1] = a2; context->argv[2] = a3;