audit(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual audit(4)
NAME
audit -- Security Event Audit
SYNOPSIS
#include <bsm/audit.h>
#include <bsm/audit_internal.h>
#include <bsm/audit_kevents.h>
DESCRIPTION
Security Event Audit is a facility to provide fine-grained, configurable
logging of security-relevant events, and is intended to meet the require-
ments of the Common Criteria (CC) Common Access Protection Profile (CAPP)
evaluation. The FreeBSD and Mac OS X audit facility implements the de
facto industry standard BSM API, file formats, and command line inter-
face, first found in the Solaris operating system. Information on the
user space implementation can be found in libbsm(3).
Audit support is enabled at boot, if present in the kernel, using an
rc.conf(5) flag or, on Mac OS X, by editing the
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.auditd.plist launchd plist file
and removing the disabled key or changing its value to false. The audit
daemon, auditd(8), is responsible for configuring the kernel to perform
audit, pushing configuration data from the various audit configuration
files into the kernel.
Audit Special Device
The FreeBSD kernel audit facility provides a special device, /dev/audit,
which is used by auditd(8) to monitor for audit events, such as requests
to cycle the log, low disk space conditions, and requests to terminate
auditing. This device is not intended for use by applications. Mac OS X
provides this same functionality using Mach IPC and a host special port.
Audit Pipe Special Devices
Audit pipe special devices, discussed in auditpipe(4), provide a config-
urable live tracking mechanism to allow applications to tee the audit
trail, as well as to configure custom preselection parameters to track
users and events in a fine-grained manner.
SEE ALSO
auditreduce(1), praudit(1), audit(2), auditctl(2), auditon(2),
getaudit(2), getauid(2), poll(2), select(2), setaudit(2), setauid(2),
libbsm(3), auditpipe(4), audit_class(5), audit_control(5),
audit_event(5), audit.log(5), audit_user(5), audit_warn(5),
launchd.plist(5), rc.conf(5), audit(8), auditd(8)
HISTORY
The OpenBSM implementation was created by McAfee Research, the security
division of McAfee Inc., under contract to Apple Computer Inc. in 2004.
It was subsequently adopted by the TrustedBSD Project as the foundation
for the OpenBSM distribution.
Support for kernel audit first appeared in Mac OS X 10.3 and FreeBSD 6.2.
AUTHORS
This software was created by McAfee Research, the security research divi-
sion of McAfee, Inc., under contract to Apple Computer Inc. Additional
authors include Wayne Salamon, Stacey Son, Robert Watson, and SPARTA Inc.
The Basic Security Module (BSM) interface to audit records and audit
event stream format were defined by Sun Microsystems.
This manual page was written by Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>.
BUGS
The audit facility in FreeBSD is considered experimental, and production
deployment should occur only after careful consideration of the risks of
deploying experimental software.
The Mac OS X and FreeBSD kernel do not fully validate that audit records
submitted by user applications are syntactically valid BSM; as submission
of records is limited to privileged processes, this is not a critical
bug.
Instrumentation of auditable events in the kernel is not complete, as
some system calls do not generate audit records, or generate audit
records with incomplete argument information.
Mandatory Access Control (MAC) labels, as provided by the mac(4) facil-
ity, are not audited as part of records involving MAC decisions.
BSD March 23, 2009 BSD
Mac OS X 10.9 - Generated Tue Oct 15 20:55:42 CDT 2013