Title

The System Administrator (SA) and Information System Security Officer (ISSO) (at a minimum) must be alerted when the audit storage volume is full. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

It is critical that when the Ubuntu operating system is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required, it takes action to mitigate the failure. 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 upon the nature of the failure mode. When availability is an overriding concern, other approved actions in response to an audit failure are as follows: 1) If the failure was caused by the lack of audit record storage capacity, the Ubuntu 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. 2) If audit records are sent to a centralized collection server and communication with this server is lost or the server fails, the Ubuntu 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 System Administrator (SA) and Information System Security Officer (ISSO) (at a minimum) are notified when the audit storage volume is full. Check which action the Ubuntu operating system takes when the audit storage volume is full with the following command: # sudo grep max_log_file_action /etc/audit/auditd.conf max_log_file_action=syslog If the value of the "max_log_file_action" option is set to "ignore", "rotate", or "suspend", or the line is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Configure the Ubuntu operating system to notify the System Administrator (SA) and Information System Security Officer (ISSO) when the audit storage volume is full by configuring the "max_log_file_action" parameter in the "/etc/audit/auditd.conf" file with the a value of "syslog" or "keep_logs": max_log_file_action=syslog

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-215038r610931_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-215038

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

Expert Comments

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