17.2 Key Terms in this Chapter

Before reading this chapter, a few key audit-related terms must be explained:

• event: An auditable event is any event that can be logged using the audit subsystem. Examples of security-relevant events include the creation of a file, the building of a network connection, or a user logging in. Events are either “attributable”, meaning that they can be traced to an authenticated user, or “non-attributable” if they cannot be. Examples of non-attributable events are any events that occur before authentication in the login process, such as bad password attempts.

• class: Event classes are named sets of related events, and are used in selection expressions. Commonly used classes of events include “file creation” (fc), “exec” (ex) and “login_logout” (lo).

• record: A record is an audit log entry describing a security event. Records contain a record event type, information on the subject (user) performing the action, date and time information, information on any objects or arguments, and a success or failure condition.

• trail: An audit trail, or log file, consists of a series of audit records describing security events. Typically, trails are in roughly chronological order with respect to the time events completed. Only authorized processes are allowed to commit records to the audit trail.

• selection expression: A selection expression is a string containing a list of prefixes and audit event class names used to match events.

• preselection: The process by which the system identifies which events are of interest to the administrator in order to avoid generating audit records describing events that are not of interest. The preselection configuration uses a series of selection expressions to identify which classes of events to audit for which users, as well as global settings that apply to both authenticated and unauthenticated processes.

• reduction: The process by which records from existing audit trails are selected for preservation, printing, or analysis. Likewise, the process by which undesired audit records are removed from the audit trail. Using reduction, administrators can implement policies for the preservation of audit data. For example, detailed audit trails might be kept for one month, but after that, trails might be reduced in order to preserve only login information for archival purposes.