Vulnerability Discussion

Without the capability to restrict the roles and individuals that can select which events are audited, unauthorized personnel may be able to prevent the auditing of critical events. Misconfigured audits may degrade the system's performance by overwhelming the audit log. Misconfigured audits may also make it more difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

Check

Verify that the files in the directory "/etc/audit/rules.d/" have a mode of "0600" or less permissive with the following command:

$ sudo find /etc/audit/rules.d/ -type f -name "*.rules" -exec stat -c "%a %n" {} \;
600 /etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules

Verify that the files "/etc/audit/audit.rules" and "/etc/audit/auditd.conf" have a mode of "0600" or less permissive with the following command:

$ sudo stat -c "%a %n" /etc/audit/audit.rules /etc/audit/auditd.conf
600 /etc/audit/audit.rules
600 /etc/audit/auditd.conf

If any of the audit configuration files have a mode more permissive than "0600", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the rules files in the directory "/etc/audit/rules.d/", the "/etc/audit/audit.rules" file, and the "/etc/audit/auditd.conf" file to have a mode of "0600" with the following commands:

$ sudo find /etc/audit/rules.d/ -type f -name "*.rules" -exec chmod 0600 {} +

$ sudo chmod 0600 /etc/audit/audit.rules

$ sudo chmod 0600 /etc/audit/auditd.conf