STIGhubSTIGhub
STIGsRMF ControlsCompare
STIGhub— A free STIG search and compliance tool·STIGs updated 3 days ago
Powered by Pylon·Privacy·Terms·© 2026 Beacon Cloud Solutions, Inc.
← Back to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Security Technical Implementation Guide

V-230412

CAT II (Medium)

Successful/unsuccessful uses of the su command in RHEL 8 must generate an audit record.

Rule ID

SV-230412r1017218_rule

STIG

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V2R7

CCIs

CCI-000169

Discussion

Without generating audit records that are specific to the security and mission needs of the organization, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one. Audit records can be generated from various components within the information system (e.g., module or policy filter). The "su" command allows a user to run commands with a substitute user and group ID. When a user logs on, the AUID is set to the UID of the account that is being authenticated. Daemons are not user sessions and have the loginuid set to "-1". The AUID representation is an unsigned 32-bit integer, which equals "4294967295". The audit system interprets "-1", "4294967295", and "unset" in the same way. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000064-GPOS-0003, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000462-GPOS-00206, SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00215, SRG-OS-000466-GPOS-00210

Check Content

Verify RHEL 8 generates audit records when successful/unsuccessful attempts to use the "su" command by performing the following command to check the file system rules in "/etc/audit/audit.rules": 

$ sudo grep -w /usr/bin/su /etc/audit/audit.rules

-a always,exit -F path=/usr/bin/su -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-priv_change

If the command does not return a line, or the line is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Configure RHEL 8 to generate audit records when successful/unsuccessful attempts to use the "su" command occur by adding or updating the following rule in "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules":

-a always,exit -F path=/usr/bin/su -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-priv_change

The audit daemon must be restarted for the changes to take effect.