Details

Without the capability to restrict which roles and individuals can select which events are audited, unauthorized personnel may be able to prevent or interfere with the auditing of critical events.

Suppression of auditing could permit an adversary to evade detection.

Misconfigured audits can degrade the system’s performance by overwhelming the audit log. Misconfigured audits may also make it more difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.

Solution

Configure PostgreSQL’s settings to allow designated personnel to select which auditable events are audited.

Using pgaudit allows administrators the flexibility to choose what they log. For an overview of the capabilities of pgaudit, see https://github.com/pgaudit/pgaudit.

See supplementary content APPENDIX-B for documentation on installing pgaudit.

See supplementary content APPENDIX-C for instructions on enabling logging. Only administrators/superuser can change PostgreSQL configurations. Access to the database administrator must be limited to designated personnel only.

To ensure that postgresql.conf is owned by the database owner:

$ chown postgres:postgres ${PGDATA?}/postgresql.conf
$ chmod 600 ${PGDATA?}/postgresql.conf

Supportive Information

The following resource is also helpful.

• https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_PGS_SQL_9-x_V2R2_STIG.zip

This security hardening control applies to the following category of controls within NIST 800-53: Audit and Accountability.This control applies to the following type of system Unix.

References

• 800-53|AU-12b.
• CAT|II
• CCI|CCI-000171
• CSCv6|3.1
• Rule-ID|SV-214071r508027_rule
• STIG-ID|PGS9-00-002600
• STIG-Legacy|SV-87543
• STIG-Legacy|V-72891
• Vuln-ID|V-214071

Source

• Tenable.com/audits