Security Auditing for Linux

malibu_mex writes: "LinuxToday, ZDNet Australia, and NewsForge are all reporting on a loadable kernel module + GUI combination that implements an auditing subsystem on Linux (Like the NT event logger, or solaris BSM). This could be yet another reason for big business and government to migrate away from the costly commercial alternatives to Linux. First it was SAMBA, now it's SNARE. What have these Aussies got with 5 letter 'S' names? This topic has been discussed on Slashdot previously here."

Comments

5 letter aussies

[FrankBough]

First it was SAMBA, now it's SNARE. What have these Aussies got with 5 letter 'S' names?

Apparently the first idea for a name was System Tracking, User Protection and Intrusion Detection but they thought that would be stupid.

Quote from Leigh in response.....

[Vermifax]

...to being questioned about being first posted to ZDnet talkback

Anon is right in saying that there have been other logging tools for Linux, linuxbsm in particular has come a long way. Unfortunately though, some of these tools are either focussed on different logging capabilities (eg: swatch is a log file watcher, it alerts users when a particular line occurs in arbitrary log files, and can actually be used in conjunction with SNARE), or seem to be stalled in development.

SNARE is more like the Windows NT event logger, or the Solaris BSM subsystem - but we hope that the experience we've had with these systems (and others: AIX, netware, Unicos, ACF2/RACF, etc.) will lead to an even better implementation for Linux.

The team at InterSect made sure that we held off releasing SNARE until we were confident that it could stand on it's own feet against the auditing subsystems from other operating systems.

The positive feedback that we're getting (thanks Sinner!) is certainly proving that people are interested, and we made the right decision.

Re:Already here?

[fanatic]

This provides the ability to monitor individual system activities that your solution lacks. For example, you could monitor each time files were opened for reading or writing, etc. It appears that you can also specify which files using matches, including regular expressions. You can find out who ran what programs with what parameters (all the system commands like rm are programs).

There was a previous thing like tis at hert.org, but it doesn't seem to be kept up anymore.

This may be the first real reason I've seen to upgrade my particular installation to 2.4 kernel.

The provision of GUI tools is nice. But my experience with Solaris BSM was that it proiduced so much output that you ended up using text tools (grep, awk, sed, perl) and running little programs that many minutes or several hours to run to get the meaningful information from out of the chaff.

Re:Been done

[Birdie-PL]

No, it's not just a glorified facelift for the various /var/log parts.

With SNARE you are able to monitor much, much more than what appears in /var/log. In example you can check who and when opened a particular file (like /etc/passwd) or run a particular process, and with what command-line options. Or which program bound to some port (great for detecting trojans 'calling home').

I assume that you can also enhance it to monitor *all* system calls, if you are particulary interested or aware of some. Nothing comes to my mind right now, but for sure there some you wish to monitor, if not control.

Knee Jerk Reaction

[weave]

Event logging on NT/2000 sucks.

• No central log host capability
• Tools to search it are crap
  
• Have to use a GUI interface to read it or dump it to a text file

OK, yes, there are third-party tools you can purchase extra to provide better functionality or you have to write some vbscript on your own to get the info. My point is, crap like this should be part of the OS. I'd rather have useful tools than a flock()ing media player, web browser, and instant messenger as part of the OS. :(

But to get back to the topic, yeah, having better auditing tools under Linux is needed. Just don't look up to Windows as the way to implement them! :)