RHBA-2012:0265 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated audit packages that fix multiple bugs and add various enhancements are
now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Description

The audit packages contain the user space utilities for storing and searching
the audit records generated by the audit subsystem in the Linux 2.6 kernel.

The audit packages have been upgraded to upstream version 1.8, which provides a
number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous version. (BZ#697013)

This update fixes the following bugs:

• When the auditd daemon was in immutable mode and was restarted, the following

message appeared: "The audit system is in immutable mode, no rules loaded". This
message was not clear and was misleading. The message has been therefore
improved to "The audit system is in immutable mode, no changes allowed".
(BZ#654883)

• The audit.rules(7) and auditctl(8) manual pages were not consistent in the

order of the "action" and "list" fields for the "-a" option. The auditctl(8)
manual page has been modified to inform users that the fields can be used in
either order. (BZ#671261)

• Previously, the autrace utility was not aware of system calls being not

available on certain architectures. As a consequence, running the "autrace -r"
command on the IBM System z, 64-bit PowerPC, and 32-bit Intel architectures
failed to insert audit rules. With this update, autrace is aware of system calls
not being available on the aforementioned architectures, and audit rules are now
successfully inserted. (BZ#702279)

• System processes, this means processes with an audit id (auid) of -1, are

logged by the audit subsystem. However, if the ausearch utility was used to
locate events where the auid was -1, all events were displayed. With this
update, the ausearch utility now correctly returns only events with an auid of

• 1. (BZ#706156)

This update also adds the following enhancement:

• This update adds a new option to the configuration of the audisp syslog

plug-in, which allows the plug-in to send syslog audit events to local syslog
facilities. (BZ#667536)

All users of audit are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix
these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant
to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red
Hat Network to apply this update are available at
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 654883 - service auditd restart output in immutable mode is not clear.
• BZ - 671261 - auditctl and audit.rules man pages inconsistent on -a option
• BZ - 697013 - audit package rebase
• BZ - 702279 - "autrace -r /bin/ls" fails to insert audit rules on s390x, ppc64 and i386
• BZ - 706156 - searching on auid = -1 results in all events

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)