Title

The macOS system must shut down by default upon audit failure (unless availability is an overriding concern). (Cat II impact)

Discussion

The audit service should shut down the computer if it is unable to audit system events. Once audit failure occurs, user and system activity is no longer recorded and malicious activity could go undetected. Audit processing failures include software/hardware errors, failures in the audit capturing mechanisms, and audit storage capacity being reached or exceeded. Responses to audit failure depend on the nature of the failure mode. When availability is an overriding concern, other approved actions in response to an audit failure are as follows: (i) If the failure was caused by the lack of audit record storage capacity, the operating system must continue generating audit records if possible (automatically restarting the audit service if necessary), overwriting the oldest audit records in a first-in-first-out manner. (ii) If audit records are sent to a centralized collection server and communication with this server is lost or the server fails, the operating system must queue audit records locally until communication is restored or until the audit records are retrieved manually. Upon restoration of the connection to the centralized collection server, action should be taken to synchronize the local audit data with the collection server.

Check Content

Verify that the audit control system is configured to shut down upon failure using the following command: sudo /usr/bin/grep ^policy /etc/security/audit_control | /usr/bin/grep ahlt If there is no result, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Edit the "/etc/security/audit_control file" and change the value for policy to include the setting "ahlt". To do this programmatically, run the following command: sudo /usr/bin/sed -i.bak '/^policy/ s/$/,ahlt/' /etc/security/audit_control; sudo /usr/sbin/audit -s

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-230773r599842_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-230773

Group Title: SRG-OS-000047-GPOS-00023

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

Controls tied to check. These are derived from the CCIs shown above.