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AUDIT(4)                                BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual                                AUDIT(4)

NAME
     audit -- Security Event Audit

SYNOPSIS
     #include <bsm/audit.h>
     #include <bsm/audit_internal.h>
     #include <bsm/audit_kevents.h>

DESCRIPTION
     Security Event Audit is a facility to provide fine-grained, configurable logging of security-relevant
     events, and is intended to meet the requirements of the Common Criteria (CC) Common Access Protection
     Profile (CAPP) evaluation.  The FreeBSD and Mac OS X audit facility implements the de facto industry
     standard BSM API, file formats, and command line interface, first found in the Solaris operating sys-tem. system.
     tem.  Information on the user space implementation can be found in libbsm(3).

     Audit support is enabled at boot, if present in the kernel, using an rc.conf(5) flag or, on Mac OS X,
     by editing the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.auditd.plist launchd plist file and removing the
     disabled key or changing its value to false.  The audit daemon, auditd(8), is responsible for configur-ing configuring
     ing the kernel to perform audit, pushing configuration data from the various audit configuration files
     into the kernel.

   Audit Special Device
     The FreeBSD kernel audit facility provides a special device, /dev/audit, which is used by auditd(8) to
     monitor for audit events, such as requests to cycle the log, low disk space conditions, and requests to
     terminate auditing.  This device is not intended for use by applications.  Mac OS X provides this same
     functionality using Mach IPC and a host special port.

   Audit Pipe Special Devices
     Audit pipe special devices, discussed in auditpipe(4), provide a configurable live tracking mechanism
     to allow applications to tee the audit trail, as well as to configure custom preselection parameters to
     track users and events in a fine-grained manner.

SEE ALSO
     auditreduce(1), praudit(1), audit(2), auditctl(2), auditon(2), getaudit(2), getauid(2), poll(2),
     select(2), setaudit(2), setauid(2), libbsm(3), auditpipe(4), audit_class(5), audit_control(5),
     audit_event(5), audit.log(5), audit_user(5), audit_warn(5), launchd.plist(5), rc.conf(5), audit(8),
     auditd(8)

HISTORY
     The OpenBSM implementation was created by McAfee Research, the security division of McAfee Inc., under
     contract to Apple Computer Inc. in 2004.  It was subsequently adopted by the TrustedBSD Project as the
     foundation for the OpenBSM distribution.

     Support for kernel audit first appeared in Mac OS X 10.3 and FreeBSD 6.2.

AUTHORS
     This software was created by McAfee Research, the security research division of McAfee, Inc., under
     contract to Apple Computer Inc.  Additional authors include Wayne Salamon, Stacey Son, Robert Watson,
     and SPARTA Inc.

     The Basic Security Module (BSM) interface to audit records and audit event stream format were defined
     by Sun Microsystems.

     This manual page was written by Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>.

BUGS
     The audit facility in FreeBSD is considered experimental, and production deployment should occur only
     after careful consideration of the risks of deploying experimental software.

     The Mac OS X and FreeBSD kernel do not fully validate that audit records submitted by user applications
     are syntactically valid BSM; as submission of records is limited to privileged processes, this is not a
     critical bug.

     Instrumentation of auditable events in the kernel is not complete, as some system calls do not generate
     audit records, or generate audit records with incomplete argument information.

     Mandatory Access Control (MAC) labels, as provided by the mac(4) facility, are not audited as part of
     records involving MAC decisions.

BSD                                            March 23, 2009                                            BSD