MD4X-00-004800 - MongoDB must utilize centralized management of the content captured in audit records generated by all components of MongoDB.

Information

Without the ability to centrally manage the content captured in the audit records, identification, troubleshooting, and correlation of suspicious behavior would be difficult and could lead to a delayed or incomplete analysis of an ongoing attack.

The content captured in audit records must be managed from a central location (necessitating automation). Centralized management of audit records and logs provides for efficiency in maintenance and management of records, as well as the backup and archiving of those records.

MongoDB may write audit records to database tables, to files in the file system, to other kinds of local repository, or directly to a centralized log management system. Whatever the method used, it must be compatible with off-loading the records to the centralized system.

Solution

If audit operations filters are not configured in the MongoDB configuration file (default location: /etc/mongod.conf), configure them according to application requirements, but at a minimum, ensure destination and filter are set in a mongod.conf YAML auditLog configuration setting.

For example, to audit all database operations involving creating or dropping a collection, the %MongoDB configuration file% (by default /etc/mongod.conf) auditLog section would read as follows:

auditLog:
destination: file
format: BSON
path: /var/log/mongodb/audit/auditLog.bson
filter: '{ atype: { $in: [ 'createCollection', 'dropCollection' ] } }'

See mongodb documentation for details of audit operations and event configuration.

https://docs.mongodb.com/v4.4/core/auditing/
https://docs.mongodb.com/v4.4/tutorial/configure-audit-filters/

Configure and/or deploy software tools to ensure that DBMS audit records are written directly to or systematically transferred to a centralized log management system.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_MDB_Enterprise_Advanced_4-x_V1R4_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: AUDIT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

References: 800-53|AU-3(2), CAT|II, CCI|CCI-001844, Rule-ID|SV-252171r981952_rule, STIG-ID|MD4X-00-004800, Vuln-ID|V-252171

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: d35d547688eafa48cc5bcf7387cee320e6b4cbb172010142f34169787d5d9a7b