The operating system must shut down by default upon audit failure (unless availability is an overriding concern).

From Apple OS X 10.11 Security Technical Implementation Guide

Part of SRG-OS-000047-GPOS-00023

Associated with: CCI-000140

SV-82185r1_rule The operating system must shut down by default upon audit failure (unless availability is an overriding concern).

Vulnerability discussion

The audit service should shut down the computer if it is unable to audit system events. Once audit failure occurs, user and system activity is no longer recorded and malicious activity could go undetected. Audit processing failures include: software/hardware errors; failures in the audit capturing mechanisms; and audit storage capacity being reached or exceeded. Responses to audit failure depend upon the nature of the failure mode.When availability is an overriding concern, other approved actions in response to an audit failure are as follows: (i) If the failure was caused by the lack of audit record storage capacity, the operating system must continue generating audit records if possible (automatically restarting the audit service if necessary), overwriting the oldest audit records in a first-in-first-out manner. (ii) If audit records are sent to a centralized collection server and communication with this server is lost or the server fails, the operating system must queue audit records locally until communication is restored or until the audit records are retrieved manually. Upon restoration of the connection to the centralized collection server, action should be taken to synchronize the local audit data with the collection server.

Check content

To view the setting for the audit control system, run the following command: sudo /usr/bin/grep ^policy /etc/security/audit_control | /usr/bin/grep ahlt If there is no result, this is a finding.

Fix text

Edit the "/etc/security/audit_control file", and change the value for policy to include the setting "ahlt". To programmatically do this, run the following command: sudo /usr/bin/sed -i.bak '/^policy/ s/$/,ahlt/' /etc/security/audit_control; sudo /usr/sbin/audit -s

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