Information stored in one location is vulnerable to accidental or incidental deletion or alteration.
Off-loading is a common process in information systems with limited audit storage capacity.
One method of off-loading audit logs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is with the use of the audisp-remote dameon. When the remote buffer is full, audit logs will not be collected and sent to the central log server.
Verify the audisp daemon is configured to take an appropriate action when the internal queue is full:
# grep "overflow_action" /etc/audisp/audispd.conf
overflow_action = syslog
If the "overflow_action" option is not "syslog", "single", or "halt", or the line is commented out, ask the System Administrator to indicate how the audit logs are off-loaded to a different system or storage media, and to indicate what action that system takes when the internal queue is full.
If there is no evidence the system is configured to off-load audit logs to a different system or storage media or, if the configuration does not take appropriate action when the internal queue is full, this is a finding.
Fix
Edit the /etc/audisp/audispd.conf file and add or update the "overflow_action" option:
overflow_action = syslog
The audit daemon must be restarted for changes to take effect: