go-audit

About

go-audit is an alternative to the auditd daemon that ships with many distros. After having created an auditd audisp plugin to convert audit logs to json, I became interested in creating a replacement for the existing daemon.

Goals

• Safe : Written in a modern language that is type safe and performant
• Fast : Never ever ever ever block if we can avoid it
• Outputs json : Yay
• Pluggable pipelines : Can write to syslog, local file, Graylog2 or stdout. Additional outputs are easily written.
• Connects to the linux kernel via netlink (info here and here)

Usage

Installation

1. Install golang, version 1.14 or greater is required

2. Clone the repo

   git clone (this repo)
   cd go-audit
   

3. Build the binary

   make
   

4. Copy the binary go-audit to wherever you'd like

Testing

• make test - run the unit test suite
• make test-cov-html - run the unit tests and open up the code coverage results
• make bench - run the benchmark test suite
• make bench-cpu - run the benchmark test suite with cpu profiling
• make bench-cpulong - run the benchmark test suite with cpu profiling and try to get some gc collection

Running as a service

Check the contrib folder, it contains examples for how to run go-audit as a proper service on your machine.

Example Config

See go-audit.yaml.example

FAQ

I am seeing Error during message receive: no buffer space available in the logs

This is because go-audit is not receiving data as quickly as your system is generating it. You can increase the receive buffer system wide and maybe it will help. Best to try and reduce the amount of data go-audit has to handle.

If reducing audit velocity is not an option you can try increasing socket_buffer.receive in your config. See Example Config for more information

socket_buffer:
    receive: <some number bigger than (the current value * 2)>

Sometime files don't have a name, only inode, what gives?

The kernel doesn't always know the filename for file access. Figuring out the filename from an inode is expensive and error prone.

You can map back to a filename, possibly not the filename, that triggured the audit line though.

sudo debugfs -R "ncheck <inode to map>" /dev/<your block device here>

I don't like math and want you to tell me the syslog priority to use

Use the default, or consult this handy table.

Wikipedia has a pretty good page on this

I am seeing duplicate entries in syslog!

This is likely because you are running journald which is also reading audit events. To disable it you need to disable the functionality in journald.

sudo systemctl mask systemd-journald-audit.socket

Thanks!

To Hardik Juneja, Arun Sori, Aalekh Nigam Aalekhn for the inspiration via https://github.com/mozilla/audit-go