Detections
Analytics

APPL-14-001003 - The macOS system must enable security auditing.

Information

Audit records establish what types of events have occurred, when they occurred, and which users were involved. These records aid an organization in their efforts to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack.

The content required to be captured in an audit record varies based on the impact level of an organization's system. Content that may be necessary to satisfy this requirement includes, for example, time stamps, source addresses, destination addresses, user identifiers, event descriptions, success/fail indications, filenames involved, and access or flow control rules invoked.

The information system initiates session audits at system startup.

Note: Security auditing is enabled by default on macOS.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015,SRG-OS-000038-GPOS-00016,SRG-OS-000039-GPOS-00017,SRG-OS-000040-GPOS-00018,SRG-OS-000041-GPOS-00019,SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020,SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00021,SRG-OS-000055-GPOS-00026,SRG-OS-000254-GPOS-00095,SRG-OS-000255-GPOS-00096,SRG-OS-000257-GPOS-00098,SRG-OS-000258-GPOS-00099,SRG-OS-000303-GPOS-00120,SRG-OS-000337-GPOS-00129,SRG-OS-000358-GPOS-00145,SRG-OS-000359-GPOS-00146,SRG-OS-000365-GPOS-00152,SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172,SRG-OS-000458-GPOS-00203,SRG-OS-000461-GPOS-00205,SRG-OS-000462-GPOS-00206,SRG-OS-000463-GPOS-00207,SRG-OS-000465-GPOS-00209,SRG-OS-000466-GPOS-00210,SRG-OS-000467-GPOS-00211,SRG-OS-000468-GPOS-00212,SRG-OS-000470-GPOS-00214,SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00215,SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00216,SRG-OS-000472-GPOS-00217,SRG-OS-000473-GPOS-00218,SRG-OS-000474-GPOS-00219,SRG-OS-000475-GPOS-00220,SRG-OS-000476-GPOS-00221,SRG-OS-000477-GPOS-00222

Solution

Configure the macOS system to enable the auditd service with the following command:

LAUNCHD_RUNNING=$(/bin/launchctl list | /usr/bin/grep -c com.apple.auditd)

if [[ ! $LAUNCHD_RUNNING == 1 ]]; then
 /bin/launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.auditd.plist
fi

if [[ ! -e /etc/security/audit_control ]] && [[ -e /etc/security/audit_control.example ]];then
 /bin/cp /etc/security/audit_control.example /etc/security/audit_control
else
 /usr/bin/touch /etc/security/audit_control
fi

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Apple_macOS_14_V2R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL, AUDIT AND ACCOUNTABILITY, MAINTENANCE

References: 800-53|AC-2(4), 800-53|AU-3, 800-53|AU-3(1), 800-53|AU-8a., 800-53|AU-8b., 800-53|AU-9, 800-53|AU-12(3), 800-53|AU-12c., 800-53|AU-14(1), 800-53|MA-4(1)(a), CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000130, CCI|CCI-000131, CCI|CCI-000132, CCI|CCI-000133, CCI|CCI-000134, CCI|CCI-000135, CCI|CCI-000159, CCI|CCI-000172, CCI|CCI-001464, CCI|CCI-001487, CCI|CCI-001494, CCI|CCI-001495, CCI|CCI-001889, CCI|CCI-001890, CCI|CCI-001914, CCI|CCI-002130, CCI|CCI-002884, CCI|CCI-003938, CCI|CCI-004188, Rule-ID|SV-259454r986254_rule, STIG-ID|APPL-14-001003, Vuln-ID|V-259454

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 898ce848bc55c2426f8875c335d6f37d749ecc87a2e85ab1f7e28c261e085f6d