VMware Postgres must be configured to overwrite older logs when necessary.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-239199	VCPG-67-000004	SV-239199r678970_rule		Medium

Description
It is critical that when the DBMS is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required, it take action to mitigate the failure. 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 on the nature of the failure mode. When availability is an overriding concern, 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 DBMS 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 DBMS 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. Systems where availability is paramount will most likely be MAC I; the final determination is the prerogative of the application owner, subject to Authorizing Official concurrence. In any case, sufficient auditing resources must be allocated to avoid audit data loss in all but the most extreme situations.

Description

It is critical that when the DBMS is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required, it take action to mitigate the failure. 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 on the nature of the failure mode. When availability is an overriding concern, 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 DBMS 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 DBMS 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. Systems where availability is paramount will most likely be MAC I; the final determination is the prerogative of the application owner, subject to Authorizing Official concurrence. In any case, sufficient auditing resources must be allocated to avoid audit data loss in all but the most extreme situations.

STIG	Date
VMware vSphere 6.7 PostgreSQL Security Technical Implementation Guide	2021-03-18

Details

Check Text ( C-42432r678968_chk )
At the command prompt, execute the following command: # /opt/vmware/vpostgres/current/bin/psql -U postgres -c "SHOW log_truncate_on_rotation;"\|sed -n 3p\|sed -e 's/^[ ]*//' Expected result: on If the output does not match the expected result, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-42391r678969_fix)
At the command prompt, execute the following commands: # /opt/vmware/vpostgres/current/bin/psql -U postgres -c "ALTER SYSTEM SET log_truncate_on_rotation TO 'on';" # /opt/vmware/vpostgres/current/bin/psql -U postgres -c "SELECT pg_reload_conf();"