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NAME
     audit - Security Event Audit


SYNOPSIS
     options AUDIT


DESCRIPTION
     Security Event Audit is a facility to provide fine-grained, configurable
     logging of security-relevant events, and is intended to meet the
     requirements of the Common Criteria (CC) Common Access Protection Profile
     (CAPP) evaluation.  The FreeBSD audit facility implements the de facto
     industry standard BSM API, file formats, and command line interface,
     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.  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 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.

   Audit Pipe Special Devices
     Audit pipe special devices, discussed in auditpipe(4), provide a
     configurable live tracking mechanism to allow applications to tee the
     audit trail, as well as to configure custom preselection paramaters 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.log(5), audit_class(5), audit_control(5),
     audit_event(5), audit_user(5), audit_warn(5), rc.conf(5), audit(8),
     auditd(8)


AUTHORS
     This software was created by McAfee Research, the security research
     division of McAfee, Inc., under contract to Apple Computer Inc.
     Additional authors include Wayne Salamon, 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〉.


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 FreeBSD 6.2.


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 FreeBSD kernel does 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)
     facility, are not audited as part of records involving MAC decisions.