+

Search Tips   |   Advanced Search

Auditing the security infrastructure

Use the Auditing Facility to report and track auditable events to ensure the integrity of our system.

Before enabling the security auditing subsystem, enable global security in the environment.

The security auditing subsystem has been introduced as part of the security infrastructure. The primary responsibility of the security infrastructure is to prevent unauthorized access and usage of resources. Utilizing security auditing has two primary goals:

Security auditing achieves these goals by providing the infrastructure that allows us to implement your code to capture and store supported auditable security events. During run time, all code other than the Java EE 5 application code is considered to be trusted. Each time a Java EE 5 application accesses a secured resource, any internal application server process with an audit point included can be recorded as an auditable event.

The security auditing subsystem has the ability to capture the following types of auditable events:

These types of events can be recorded into audit log files. Each audit log has the option to be signed and encrypted to ensure data integrity. These audit log files can be analyzed to discover breaches over the existing security mechanisms and to discover potential weaknesses in the current security infrastructure. Security event audit records are also useful for providing evidence of accountability and nonrepudiation as well as vulnerability analysis. The security auditing configuration provides four default filters, a default audit service provider, and a default event factory. The default implementation write to a binary text-file based log. Use this topic to customize our security auditing subsystem.


Tasks

  1. Enable the security auditing subsystem

    Security auditing will not be performed unless the audit security subsystem has been enabled. Global security must be enabled for the security audit subsystem to function, as no security auditing occurs if global security is not also enabled.

  2. Assign the auditor role to a user

    A user with the auditor role is required to enable and configure the security auditing subsystem. The auditor role has been created providing granularity to allow for separation of the auditing role from the authority of the administrator. When Security Auditing is initially enabled, the cell administrator has auditor privileges. If the environment requires separation of privileges, then changes will need to be made to the default role assignments.

  3. Create security auditing event type filters

    We can configure event type filters to only record a specific subset of auditable event types in our audit logs. Filtering the event types that are recorded makes for easier analysis of our audit records by ensuring only those records important to the environment are archived.

  4. Configure the audit service provider.

    The audit service provider is used to format the audit data object that was passed to it before outputting the data to a repository. A default audit service provider implementation is in included. A third party implementation can also be coded and used. See Configure a third party audit service providers for security auditing for more details on this implementation.

    (ZOS) An implementation for SMF is also available. See Configure the SMF audit service providers for security auditing for more details on this implementation.

  5. Configure audit event factories for security auditing

    The audit event factory gathers the data associated with the auditable events and creates an audit data object. The audit data object is then sent to the audit service provider to be formatted and recorded to the repository.

  6. Protect our security audit data

    To ensure that access to the data is restricted and tamper proof, we can encrypt and sign our audit data.

  7. Configure security audit subsystem failure notifications

    Notifications can be enabled to generate alerts when the security auditing subsystem experiences a failure. Notifications can be configured to record an alert in the System logs or can be configured to send an alert through email to a specified list of recipients.

  8. Use the audit reader to review audit data.


What to do next

After configuring security auditing, we can analyze our audit data for potential weaknesses in the current security infrastructure and to discover security breaches that may have occurred over the existing security mechanisms. We can also use the security auditing subsystem to provide data for problem determination. If the default audit service provider was selected, the resulting binary audit log file can be read using the Audit Reader.


Subtopics


  • Task overview: Securing resources
  • Configure security auditing using scripting
  • Administrative roles, including Auditor