auditing syscalls made 'by' an inode?

Steve Grubb sgrubb at redhat.com
Fri Jun 8 13:35:01 UTC 2012


On Thursday, June 07, 2012 06:31:47 PM Peter Moody wrote:
> Is there anyway to audit syscalls made by a particular, not yet
> running, application?

No...its one of the things I've been interested in for a long time. About as 
close as you get is using the selinux process context. But if its 
bin_t...there's a couple thousand processes with the same label.


> For example, if I'm interested in seeing all
> exec's by google-chrome, can I do something like the following?
> 
> auditctl -a exit,always -F arch=b64 -S execve -F success=1 -F
> inode=inode-of-chrome
> 
> experimenting seems to indicate that will only tell me when
> inode-of-chrome is exec'd, basically a watch rule.
> 
> The sort of inverse of this rule that got me thinking about this
> initially was auditing a syscall and seeing if it was/wasn't called by
> a particular program. For example, audting all bind() calls which
> *aren't* made by chrome (a silly rule to be sure, but just thrown out
> as a hypothetical)
> 
> If it's not possible to do this now, is there interest in adding this
> feature?

Yes. I'd be interested in seeing this available. But if you do implement it, its 
more natural to express the rule by process name. But the kernel does not do 
string comparisons. So, what you would likely need to do is lookup the path to 
get the inode, then when it executes a new kind of pid rule gets created 
probably off the list like watches do. There are some apps like apache which fork 
multiple copies and that adds a wrinkle because you would want to audit all of 
them. And then there are  threads...

-Steve




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