SQL4-00-037700 - SQL Server must generate Trace or Audit records for all privileged activities or other system-level access - Event ID 176

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. This encompasses, but is not necessarily limited to:
CREATE
ALTER
DROP
GRANT
REVOKE
DENY

There may also be Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements that, subject to context, should be regarded as privileged. Possible examples in SQL include:

TRUNCATE TABLE;
DELETE, or
DELETE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or
DELETE without a WHERE clause;

UPDATE or
UPDATE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or
UPDATE without a WHERE clause;

any SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to an application-defined security table executed by other than a security principal.

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.

Use of SQL Server Audit is recommended. All features of SQL Server Audit are available in the Enterprise and Developer editions of SQL Server 2014. It is not available at the database level in other editions. For this or legacy reasons, the instance may be using SQL Server Trace for auditing, which remains an acceptable solution for the time being. Note, however, that Microsoft intends to remove most aspects of Trace at some point after SQL Server 2016.

Solution

Where SQL Server Trace is in use, define and enable a trace that captures all auditable events. The script provided in the supplemental file Trace.sql can be used to do this.

For additional actions considered privileged, identify the available event class IDs, or define custom event class IDs (integers in the range 82-91). Add blocks of code for these event IDs to Trace.sql.

Execute Trace.sql.

Define triggers as necessary to support data capture.

Where SQL Server Audit is in use, design and deploy a SQL Server Audit that captures all auditable events. The script provided in the supplemental file Audit.sql can be used to create an audit; supplement it as necessary to capture any additional, locally-defined privileged activity.

Item Details

Audit Name: DISA STIG SQL Server 2014 Instance DB Audit v2r4

Category: AUDIT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Plugin: MS_SQLDB

Control ID: 99d6f221575684c353190f65d9f41f0c70b88ca6b99ea9553bee04c3cd5bb53a

Detections

Analytics

SQL4-00-037700 - SQL Server must generate Trace or Audit records for all privileged activities or other system-level access - Event ID 176

Information

Solution

See Also

Item Details