DB2X-00-011700 - DB2 must generate audit records when unsuccessful attempts to execute privileged activities or other system-level access occur

Information

Without tracking privileged activity, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

System documentation should include a definition of the functionality considered privileged.

A privileged function in this context is any operation that modifies the structure of the database, its built-in logic, or its security settings. This would include all Data Definition Language (DDL) statements and all security-related statements. In an SQL environment, it encompasses, but is not necessarily limited to:

CREATE
ALTER
DROP
GRANT
REVOKE

Note that it is particularly important to audit, and tightly control, any action that weakens the implementation of this requirement itself, since the objective is to have a complete audit trail of all administrative activity.

To aid in diagnosis, it is necessary to keep track of failed attempts in addition to the successful ones.

Solution

Define an audit policy with the needed subset using the CREATE AUDIT POLICY SQL statement:
DB2> CREATE AUDIT POLICY <DB audit policy name>
CATEGORIES SECMAINT STATUS BOTH, OBJMAINT STATUS BOTH, AUDIT STATUS BOTH, SYSADMIN STATUS BOTH, CONTEXT STATUS BOTH
ERROR TYPE AUDIT

To modify an existing audit policy, replace 'CREATE' with 'ALTER' in the preceding statement. Only the categories explicitly named in the statement will be affected. In this case, the changes take effect immediately.

If CREATE was used above, apply the policy created above to the database:
DB2> AUDIT DATABASE USING POLICY <DB audit policy name>

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_IBM_DB2_V10-5_LUW_V2R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: AUDIT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

References: 800-53|AU-12c., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000172, Rule-ID|SV-213756r879875_rule, STIG-ID|DB2X-00-011700, STIG-Legacy|SV-89261, STIG-Legacy|V-74587, Vuln-ID|V-213756

Plugin: IBM_DB2DB

Control ID: ab83c32ff569318eadf73f762e1433403eafc3f2ab52327ab7fc70a3ef6d5ad1