Overview of the Auditing Process
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Auditing is the recording of security-relevant activity as it occurs on the system and the subsequent analysis of this audit log. With auditing, you can monitor users' activity on the system and, if necessary, reconstruct events leading up to attempts to compromise the security of your system. Thus, it is not as much a method of protecting the system and its data as a method of analyzing and recording system use.
Anything that has to do with a user's access to the system or to a protected object within the system is considered a security-relevant activity. Such activities are called events. Typical events include the following:
Logins, logouts, or login failures
Changes to the authorization database
Access to a protected object, such as a file, device, or global section
Changes in privileges or the security attributes of protected objects
The operating system can record both successful and unsuccessful events. Sometimes the unsuccessful can be more revealing. For example, it is less important to record that a programmer displayed a file to which he had access than that the same programmer tried to but was prevented from displaying a protected file.
The event message itself can be written to two places: an audit log file or an operator terminal that is enabled to receive security class messages. As “Sample Alarm Message” shows, a message contains the following data:
Date and time of the message
Type of event
Date and time the event occurred
The process identification (PID) of the user who caused the event
Additional information in auditing messages is specific to the type of event. See “Alarm Messages” for examples of different messages.
Example 10-1 Sample Alarm Message
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