PGS9-00-005800 - PostgreSQL must generate audit records for all privileged activities or other system-level access - pgaudit.log

Information

Without tracking privileged activity, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

System documentation should include a definition of the functionality considered privileged.

A privileged function in this context is any operation that modifies the structure of the database, its built-in logic, or its security settings. This would include all Data Definition Language (DDL) statements and all security-related statements. In an SQL environment, it encompasses, but is not necessarily limited to:

CREATE
ALTER
DROP
GRANT
REVOKE

There may also be Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements that, subject to context, should be regarded as privileged. Possible examples in SQL include:

TRUNCATE TABLE, DELETE, or DELETE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or DELETE without a WHERE clause.

UPDATE or UPDATE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or UPDATE without a WHERE clause.

Any SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to an application-defined security table executed by other than a security principal.

Depending on the capabilities of PostgreSQL and the design of the database and associated applications, audit logging may be achieved by means of DBMS auditing features, database triggers, other mechanisms, or a combination of these.

Note: That it is particularly important to audit, and tightly control, any action that weakens the implementation of this requirement itself, since the objective is to have a complete audit trail of all administrative activity.

Solution

Note: The following instructions use the PGDATA and PGVER environment variables. See supplementary content APPENDIX-F for instructions on configuring PGDATA and APPENDIX-H for PGVER.

Using pgaudit PostgreSQL can be configured to audit these requests. See supplementary content APPENDIX-B for documentation on installing pgaudit.

With pgaudit installed the following configurations can be made:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ vi ${PGDATA?}/postgresql.conf

Add the following parameters (or edit existing parameters):
shared_preload_libraries = 'pgaudit'
pgaudit.log='ddl, role, read, write'

Now, as the system administrator, reload the server with the new configuration:

# SYSTEMD SERVER ONLY
$ sudo systemctl reload postgresql-${PGVER?}

# INITD SERVER ONLY
$ sudo service postgresql-${PGVER?} reload

Item Details

Audit Name: DISA STIG PostgreSQL 9.x on RHEL DB v2r3

Category: AUDIT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Plugin: PostgreSQLDB

Control ID: e753256f35f0ee8e750bc9d2e821d89c3dbb06a9097e32646e0bf52bf3e9c1e4

Detections

Analytics

PGS9-00-005800 - PostgreSQL must generate audit records for all privileged activities or other system-level access - pgaudit.log

Information

Solution

See Also

Item Details