NAME
auditd - The Linux Audit daemon
SYNOPSIS
auditd [-f] [-l] [-n] [-s disable|enable|nochange]
DESCRIPTION
auditd is the userspace component to the Linux Auditing System. It’s
responsible for writing audit records to the disk. Viewing the logs is
done with the ausearch or aureport utilities. Configuring the audit
rules is done with the auditctl utility. During startup, the rules in
/etc/audit/audit.rules are read by auditctl. The audit daemon itself
has some configuration options that the admin may wish to customize.
They are found in the auditd.conf file.
OPTIONS
-f leave the audit daemon in the foreground for debugging. Messages
also go to stderr rather than the audit log.
-l allow the audit daemon to follow symlinks for config files.
-n no fork. This is useful for running off of inittab
-s=ENABLE_STATE
specify when starting if auditd should change the current value
for the kernel enabled flag. Valid values for ENABLE_STATE are
"disable", "enable" or "nochange". The default is to enable (and
disable when auditd terminates). The value of the enabled flag
may be changed during the lifetime of auditd using ’auditctl
-e’.
SIGNALS
SIGHUP causes auditd to reconfigure. This means that auditd re-reads
the configuration file. If there are no syntax errors, it will
proceed to implement the requested changes. If the reconfigure
is successful, a DAEMON_CONFIG event is recorded in the logs. If
not successful, error handling is controlled by
space_left_action, admin_space_left_action, disk_full_action,
and disk_error_action parameters in auditd.conf.
SIGTERM
caused auditd to discontinue processing audit events, write a
shutdown audit event, and exit.
SIGUSR1
causes auditd to immediately rotate the logs. It will consult
the max_log_size_action to see if it should keep the logs or
not.
SIGUSR2
causes auditd to attemp to resume logging. This is usually used
after logging has been suspended.
FILES
/etc/audit/auditd.conf - configuration file for audit daemon
/etc/audit/audit.rules - audit rules to be loaded at startup
NOTES
A boot param of audit=1 should be added to ensure that all processes
that run before the audit daemon starts is marked as auditable by the
kernel. Not doing that will make a few processes impossible to properly
audit.
The audit daemon can receive audit events from other audit daemons via
the audisp-remote audispd plugin. The audit daemon may be linked with
tcp_wrappers to control which machines can connect. If this is the
case, you can add an entry to hosts.allow and deny.
SEE ALSO
auditd.conf(5), audispd(8), ausearch(8), aureport(8), auditctl(8).
AUTHOR
Steve Grubb