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  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.log(5),    audit_class(5),
       audit_control(5),   audit_event(5),   audit_user(5),   audit_warn(5),  rc.conf(5),  audit(8),  auditd(8),
       auditdistd(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 FreeBSD 6.2.

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>.

BUGS

       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.

       Currently the audit syscalls are not supported for jailed processes.  However, if  a  process  has  audit
       session  state  associated  with it, audit records will still be produced and a zonename token containing
       the jail's ID or name will be present in the audit records.

Debian                                            May 31, 2009                                          AUDIT(4)