PPS9-00-002200 - The EDB Postgres Advanced Server must include additional, more detailed, organization-defined information in the audit records for audit events identified by type, location, or subject.

Information

Information system auditing capability is critical for accurate forensic analysis. Reconstruction of harmful events or forensic analysis is not possible if audit records do not contain enough information. To support analysis, some types of events will need information to be logged that exceeds the basic requirements of event type, time stamps, location, source, outcome, and user identity. If additional information is not available, it could negatively impact forensic investigations into user actions or other malicious events.

The organization must determine what additional information is required for complete analysis of the audited events. The additional information required is dependent on the type of information (e.g., sensitivity of the data and the environment within which it resides). At a minimum, the organization must employ either full-text recording of privileged commands or the individual identities of group users, or both. The organization must maintain audit trails in sufficient detail to reconstruct events to determine the cause and impact of compromise.

Examples of detailed information the organization may require in audit records are full-text recording of privileged commands or the individual identities of group account users.

In EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Advanced Server, the edb_audit_tag can be used to record additional information. This tag can be set to different values by different sessions (connections), and can be set to new values any number of times. How to recognize the conditions for producing such audit data has to be determined and coded for as part of application and database design.

NOTE: Nessus has provided the target output to assist in reviewing the benchmark to ensure target compliance.

Solution

Execute the following SQL to set additional detailed information for the audit records in the session:

set edb_audit_tag = '<information>';

Replace <information> with a character string holding the additional data that must be captured.

To set this in a trigger, an example is included below. Keep in mind that the edb_audit_tag is set for the life of the session, not just the life of the insert command:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION add_audit_info()
RETURNS trigger AS
$BODY$
BEGIN
SET edb_audit_tag = '<information>';
RETURN NEW;
END;
$BODY$
LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER add_audit_info_trigger
BEFORE INSERT
ON <table>
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE PROCEDURE add_audit_info();

Item Details

Audit Name: EDB PostgreSQL Advanced Server DB Audit v2r3

Category: AUDIT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Plugin: PostgreSQLDB

Control ID: 6f75a95cd142d0f628354f165bc421244e6c7156c5e696aad9ccde6aa09416a2

Detections

Analytics

PPS9-00-002200 - The EDB Postgres Advanced Server must include additional, more detailed, organization-defined information in the audit records for audit events identified by type, location, or subject.

Information

Solution

See Also

Item Details