RHEL 9 must audit all uses of the usermod command.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-258209	RHEL-09-654175	SV-258209r958412_rule		Medium

Description
Without generating audit record specific to the security and mission needs of the organization, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one. Audit records can be generated from various components within the information system (e.g., module or policy filter). When a user logs on, the auid is set to the uid of the account being authenticated. Daemons are not user sessions and have the loginuid set to -1. The auid representation is an unsigned 32-bit integer, which equals 4294967295. The audit system interprets -1, 4294967295, and "unset" in the same way. The system call rules are loaded into a matching engine that intercepts each system call made by all programs on the system. Therefore, it is very important to use system call rules only when absolutely necessary since these affect performance. The more rules, the bigger the performance hit. The performance can be helped, however, by combining system calls into one rule whenever possible. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000462-GPOS-00206, SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00215, SRG-OS-000466-GPOS-00210

Description

Without generating audit record specific to the security and mission needs of the organization, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one. Audit records can be generated from various components within the information system (e.g., module or policy filter). When a user logs on, the auid is set to the uid of the account being authenticated. Daemons are not user sessions and have the loginuid set to -1. The auid representation is an unsigned 32-bit integer, which equals 4294967295. The audit system interprets -1, 4294967295, and "unset" in the same way. The system call rules are loaded into a matching engine that intercepts each system call made by all programs on the system. Therefore, it is very important to use system call rules only when absolutely necessary since these affect performance. The more rules, the bigger the performance hit. The performance can be helped, however, by combining system calls into one rule whenever possible. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000462-GPOS-00206, SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00215, SRG-OS-000466-GPOS-00210

STIG	Date
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2024-06-04

Details

Check Text ( C-61950r926612_chk )
Verify that RHEL 9 is configured to audit the execution of the "usermod" command with the following command: $ sudo auditctl -l \| grep usermod -a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/usermod -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-usermod If the command does not return a line, or the line is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-61874r926613_fix)
Configure RHEL 9 to generate audit records upon successful/unsuccessful attempts to use the "usermod " command by adding or updating the following rule in "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules": -a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/usermod -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-usermod The audit daemon must be restarted for the changes to take effect.