Vulnerability Discussion

Without the capability to generate audit records, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

If auditing is enabled late in the startup process, the actions of some startup processes may not be audited. Some audit systems also maintain state information available only if auditing is enabled before a given process is created.

Check

Verify RHEL 10 is configured so that GRUB 2 enables auditing of processes that start prior to the audit daemon with the following commands:

Check that the current GRUB 2 configuration enables auditing:

$ sudo grubby --info=ALL | grep args | grep -v 'audit=1'

If any output is returned, this is a finding.

Check that auditing is enabled by default to persist in kernel updates:

$ sudo grep audit /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="audit=1"

If "audit" is not set to "1", is missing, or is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure RHEL 10 to enable auditing of processes that start prior to the audit daemon with the following command:

$ sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="audit=1"

Add or modify the following line in "/etc/default/grub" to ensure the configuration survives kernel updates:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="audit=1"