Title

The operating system must use cryptographic mechanisms to protect the integrity of audit tools. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

Protecting the integrity of the tools used for auditing purposes is a critical step toward ensuring the integrity of audit information. Audit information includes all information (e.g., audit records, audit settings, and audit reports) needed to successfully audit information system activity. Audit tools include, but are not limited to, vendor-provided and open source audit tools needed to successfully view and manipulate audit information system activity and records. Audit tools include custom queries and report generators. It is not uncommon for attackers to replace the audit tools or inject code into the existing tools with the purpose of providing the capability to hide or erase system activity from the audit logs. To address this risk, audit tools must be cryptographically signed in order to provide the capability to identify when the audit tools have been modified, manipulated, or replaced. An example is a checksum hash of the file or files. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000278-GPOS-00108

Check Content

Verify the operating system uses cryptographic mechanisms to protect the integrity of audit tools. If it does not, this is a finding. AIDE is one tool that may be used to check this. To see if AIDE is installed: # pkg info aide aide-0.16 Name : aide Version : 0.16 Installed on : Tue Mar 27 09:56:37 2018 UTC Origin : security/aide Architecture : FreeBSD:10:amd64 Prefix : /usr/local Categories : security Licenses : Maintainer : cy@FreeBSD.org WWW : https://sourceforge.net/projects/aide/ Comment : Replacement and extension for Tripwire Annotations : repo_type : binary repository : FreeBSD Flat size : 1.31MiB Description : AIDE is Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment. This piece of software was written as a replacement and extension for Tripwire. WWW: https://sourceforge.net/projects/aide/ If AIDE is not installed, pkg will say "No package(s) matching aide." To see if it runs periodically: $ cat /etc/crontab $ ls /etc/cron.d/* One of these may indicate that AIDE is being run. $ grep audit /etc/aide.conf If there are no lines indicating audit binaries (audit and auditd) and audit configurations in /etc/security/ are being monitored, this is a finding. Other auditing software is available, such as Tripwire. Ask the system adminitrator if they are using an alternative system.

Fix Text

Configure the operating system to use cryptographic mechanisms to protect the integrity of audit tools.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID:

Vulnerability ID: V-1080

Group Title:

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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