Title

Successful/unsuccessful uses of the unix_update in RHEL 8 must generate an audit record. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

Reconstruction of harmful events or forensic analysis is not possible if audit records do not contain enough information. At a minimum, the organization must audit the full-text recording of privileged commands. The organization must maintain audit trails in sufficient detail to reconstruct events to determine the cause and impact of compromise. "Unix_update" is a helper program for the "pam_unix" module that updates the password for a given user. It is not intended to be run directly from the command line and logs a security violation if done so. When a user logs on, the AUID is set to the UID of the account that is being authenticated. Daemons are not user sessions and have the loginuid set to "-1". The AUID representation is an unsigned 32-bit integer, which equals "4294967295". The audit system interprets "-1", "4294967295", and "unset" in the same way. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000462-GPOS-00206, SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00215

Check Content

Verify that an audit event is generated for any successful/unsuccessful use of the "unix_update" by performing the following command to check the file system rules in "/etc/audit/audit.rules": $ sudo grep -w "unix_update" /etc/audit/audit.rules -a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/unix_update -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-unix-update If the command does not return a line, or the line is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Configure the audit system to generate an audit event for any successful/unsuccessful uses of the "unix_update" by adding or updating the following rule in the "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules" file: -a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/unix_update -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-unix-update The audit daemon must be restarted for the changes to take effect.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-230426r627750_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-230426

Group Title: SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031

Expert Comments

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