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

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-57657	WN12-SO-000010	SV-72067r1_rule		Medium

Description
It is critical that when the operating system is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required, it takes 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 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: 1) 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. 2) 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.

Description

It is critical that when the operating system is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required, it takes 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 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: 1) 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. 2) 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.

STIG	Date
Windows Server 2012 / 2012 R2 Member Server Security Technical Implementation Guide	2015-06-16

Details

Check Text ( C-58479r1_chk )
Verify the operating system shuts down by default upon audit failure (unless availability is an overriding concern). If the following registry value does not exist or is not configured as specified, this is a finding: Registry Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE Registry Path: \System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa Value Name: CrashOnAuditFail Value Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1 If this is set to "Enabled" and system halts, the registry value above must be manually changed back from "2" to "1" using the registry editor.

Check Text ( C-58479r1_chk )

Verify the operating system shuts down by default upon audit failure (unless availability is an overriding concern).

If the following registry value does not exist or is not configured as specified, this is a finding:

Registry Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Registry Path: \System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Value Name: CrashOnAuditFail

Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1

If this is set to "Enabled" and system halts, the registry value above must be manually changed back from "2" to "1" using the registry editor.

Fix Text (F-62859r3_fix)
Configure the operating system to shut down by default upon audit failure (unless availability is an overriding concern). Configure the policy value for Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options -> "Audit: Shut down system immediately if unable to log security audits" to "Enabled".