Title

The DBMS must generate audit records for all privileged activities or other system-level access. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

Without tracking privileged activity, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one. System documentation should include a definition of the functionality considered privileged. A privileged function in this context is any operation that modifies the structure of the database, its built-in logic, or its security settings. This would include all Data Definition Language (DDL) statements and all security-related statements. In an SQL environment, it encompasses, but is not necessarily limited to: CREATE ALTER DROP GRANT REVOKE DENY There may also be Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements that, subject to context, should be regarded as privileged. Possible examples in SQL include: TRUNCATE TABLE; DELETE, or DELETE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or DELETE without a WHERE clause; UPDATE or UPDATE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or UPDATE without a WHERE clause; any SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to an application-defined security table executed by other than a security principal. Depending on the capabilities of the DBMS and the design of the database and associated applications, audit logging may be achieved by means of DBMS auditing features, database triggers, other mechanisms, or a combination of these. Note that it is particularly important to audit, and tightly control, any action that weakens the implementation of this requirement itself, since the objective is to have a complete audit trail of all administrative activity.

Check Content

Review DBMS documentation to verify that authorized administrative users can designate actions as privileged and that audit records can be produced when privileged actions occur. If the DBMS is not capable of this, this is a finding. Review the system documentation to obtain the definition of the database/DBMS functionality considered privileged in the context of the system in question. Review the DBMS/database security and audit configurations and/or other means used to implement audit logging. If audit logging covers at least all of the actions defined as privileged, this is not a finding; otherwise, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Deploy a DBMS capable of producing the required audit records when privileged actions occur. Configure the DBMS to produce audit records when privileged actions occur.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-206632r879875_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-206632

Group Title: SRG-APP-000504

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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