Systemd Journald and audit logging causing journal issues

Tue Oct 17 16:25:55 UTC 2017

On Tuesday, October 17, 2017 11:40:12 AM EDT Brad Zynda wrote:
> Hey Steve,
> 
> No problem you guys are busy with updates..
> 
> So I kind of stepped into a known issue with a current disagreement
> between the 2 maintainers?

Its not a disagreement. Its systemd wants to do everything. Its a crond/
xinetd/syslogd/auditd/core dump collector/udev/login service/fstab/fs 
automounter/container manager/file system monitor/resource manager/daemon 
watchdog  and oh by the way, it does init.

> what can be done to resolve this going
> forward as it is killing services in production environments?

End users have to take the situation into their own hands. There are 
configuration knobs for a reason. More info here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1227379

> I agree with the need not to remove auditing as this is a slippery slope
> and should not occur but the decision was based on little documentation
> in regards to the problem and loss of service, I will look at further
> checking in hopes to find the specific rule. Though I think the latter
> to fix the issue is the appropriate avenue.

Figuring out which rule is triggering is the best solution. It may turn out 
you just have a busy system. But most of the time its a bad rule.

> The rules have been put in place across many organizations that check
> with tools like CIS-CAT and OSCAP, so a lot of rules and a point of
> possible single failure.

They make mistakes, too.

> In regards to the audit.socket what is the expected outcome of masking
> this service?

The expected outcome is that journald stops getting audit records. It doesn't 
solve the problem of why you are getting so many events. Fixing the rule does 
that.

-Steve

> On 10/17/2017 11:25 AM, Steve Grubb wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I apologize for the late reply...just found the message.
> > 
> > On Monday, October 2, 2017 1:30:19 PM EDT Brad Zynda wrote:
> >> I am sending along an issue brought to the systemd-journald dev list
> >> initially:
> >> 
> >> On 10/02/2017 11:40 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> >>> On Mo, 02.10.17 11:25, Brad Zynda (bradley.v.zynda at nasa.gov) wrote:
> >>>> Sep 28 13:50:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 73244 messages
> >>>> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >>> 
> >>> The question is: why does auditd even log to the journal?
> > 
> > It doesn't. I have had many arguments with the systemd people about
> > polluting syslog with audit events. If we wanted audit events there, we
> > would have wrote them there. The journal is listening on a multicast
> > audit socket that was created just for them and using a posix capability
> > that was created just for them. And journal also turns on auditing even
> > if you didn't want it. In short, they have, with intention, created your
> > problem.
> > 
> >>>> Now we are required to have full audit rules and does this look like at
> >>>> rate limiting issue or an issue of journal not able to handle the
> >>>> traffic to logging?
> >>> 
> >>> journald detected that it got flooded with too many messages in too
> >>> short a time from auditd. if this happens then something is almost
> >>> certainly off with auditd, as auditd is not supposed to flood journald
> >>> with messages, after all it maintains its own auditing log database.
> > 
> > No...that's the way it works. If you want the audit stream, you have to be
> > able to handle it. My suggestion is that we have a separation of duties.
> > Auditd has audit events, journal has syslog. Besides, mixing audit and
> > syslog data means the security officer and system admin roles have been
> > combined. I think there is an audit.socket unit file that can be masked.
> > 
> >>> Please ping the auditd folks for help
> > 
> > They created the problem of audit events in syslog. That said, its been my
> > experience that whenever you get lots of events, there may be something
> > wrong with your rules.
> > 
> > The normal technique to figure out what wrong is to run aureport --summary
> > --key during the time range of the flood to see what rule is triggering.
> > Then we can look at that rule to see if there's something wrong with it.
> > 
> > More below...
> > 
> >> Hey Everyone,
> >> 
> >> Not sure if this is a bug so:
> >> 
> >> systemctl status -l systemd-journald.service
> >> ● systemd-journald.service - Journal Service
> >> 
> >>    Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-journald.service;
> >> 
> >> static; vendor preset: disabled)
> >> 
> >>    Active: active (running) since Tue 2017-09-26 20:01:16 UTC; 5 days ago
> >>    
> >>      Docs: man:systemd-journald.service(8)
> >>      
> >>            man:journald.conf(5)
> >>  
> >>  Main PID: 565 (systemd-journal)
> >>  
> >>    Status: "Processing requests..."
> >>    CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-journald.service
> >>    
> >>            └─565 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
> >> 
> >> Sep 28 13:50:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 73244 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 13:51:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 98979 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 13:52:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 109433 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 13:53:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 99788 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 13:54:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 111605 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 13:55:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 111591 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 13:56:03 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 107947 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 13:57:51 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 32760 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Sep 28 17:21:40 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 210 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> Oct 01 02:16:01 server systemd-journal[565]: Suppressed 1333 messages
> >> from /system.slice/auditd.service
> >> 
> >> journalctl --verify
> >> PASS: /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system.journal
> >> PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-000000000097f6c7-0005596b745b4d1c.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-000000000096a587-00055966f35ae59a.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-00000000009554f1-000559629c4cdb7e.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-0000000000940591-0005595e1811a2d1.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-000000000092b500-00055959f2de5ede.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-0000000000916479-0005595573137b74.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-0000000000901337-00055950d80cc3d8.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-00000000008ec2fb-0005594cad14b07a.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-00000000008d7373-0005594838683e58.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-00000000008c238e-00055943fe2072e3.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-00000000008ad1d9-0005593ff64a4f69.journal PASS:
> >> /run/log/journal/d28b0080ffe0432a974f36e4fb4bfa9b/system at 0d49221d68d04ef0
> >> b95 d8203c5e96a46-0000000000897f32-0005593e18c5758b.journal
> >> 
> >> 
> >> journalctl --disk-usage
> >> Archived and active journals take up 1.1G on disk.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Initially we saw:
> >> 16733 PATH
> >> 5070 SYSCALL
> >> 5024 CWD
> >> 3765 AVC
> >> 323 CRYPTO_KEY_USER
> >> 223 USER_START
> >> 222 USER_ACCT
> >> 222 CRED_ACQ
> >> 220 LOGIN
> >> 220 CRED_REFR
> >> 218 USER_END
> >> 218 CRED_DISP
> >> 46 USER_LOGIN
> >> 12 EXECVE
> >> 4 USER_AUTH
> >> 2 CRYPTO_SESSION
> >> 1 USER_ROLE_CHANGE
> >> 1 USER_CMD
> >> 1 SERVICE_STOP
> >> 1 SERVICE_START
> >> 1 BPRM_FCAPS
> >> 
> >> so we blocked type PATH in audit.rules
> > 
> > This is not the right thing to do. If a security officer asks what is
> > being
> > accessed, you got rid of the information. The right thing is to figure out
> > which rule is being hit and see if something is wrong with it. For
> > example, I have seen people do this:
> > 
> > -a always,exit -S open,openat -F exit=-EPERM
> > 
> > The problem is that they did not restrict the rule an architecture and
> > they
> > were getting lots of events for the wrong syscall. I've also seen people
> > add -F success 0 to an open syscall. This also results in a large number
> > of events.
> > 
> > So, I'd recommend making sure all rules have keys added and the running
> > the
> > key summary report to see what rule needs inspection.
> > 
> > If you find the rule that's causing the problem and you want an opinion,
> > send it to the mail list.
> > 
> > -Steve
> > 
> >> But we are still seeing 100K of dropped/suppressed messages.
> >> 
> >> Note: systemloglevel = INFO
> >> 
> >> Centos 7 1708 3.10.0-693.2.2.el7.x86_64
> >> 
> >> systemd.x86_64                      219-42.el7_4.1
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Now we are required to have full audit rules and does this look like at
> >> rate limiting issue or an issue of journal not able to handle the
> >> traffic to logging?
> >> 
> >> Error we are seeing from services that have silently failed, in this
> >> case glassfish..
> >> 
> >> systemctl status -l glassfish
> >> ● glassfish.service - SYSV: GlassFish start and stop  daemon
> >> 
> >>    Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/glassfish; bad; vendor preset:
> >>    disabled)
> >> 
> >> Active: active (exited) since Tue 2017-09-26 20:01:36 UTC; 5 days ago
> >> Docs:
> >> man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
> >> 
> >>   Process: 1328 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/glassfish start (code=exited,
> >> 
> >> status=0/SUCCESS)
> >> 
> >> Warning: Journal has been rotated since unit was started. Log output is
> >> incomplete or unavailable.
> >> 
> >> Eventually glassfish will fail but it wont kill the service so we never
> >> get an nms service down trap from the OID.
> >> 
> >> Please let me know if further info is needed or if certain limits need
> >> to be adjusted.
> >> 
> >> Thanks,
> >> Brad Zynda
> >> 
> >> 
> >> --
> >> Linux-audit mailing list
> >> Linux-audit at redhat.com
> >> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-audit