STIGUI
V-277062CAT II — Medium severitySV-277062r1149405_rule

The macOS system must enable security auditing.

Rule version APPL-26-001003 · STIG v1 · 2026-09-01

Discussion

The information system must be configured to generate audit records.

Audit records establish what types of events have occurred, when they occurred, and which users were involved. These records aid an organization in their efforts to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack.

The content required to be captured in an audit record varies based on the impact level of an organization's system. Content that may be necessary to satisfy this requirement includes, for example, time stamps, source addresses, destination addresses, user identifiers, event descriptions, success/fail indications, filenames involved, and access or flow control rules invoked.

The information system initiates session audits at system startup.

Note: Security auditing is NOT enabled by default on macOS Tahoe.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000038-GPOS-00016, SRG-OS-000039-GPOS-00017, SRG-OS-000040-GPOS-00018, SRG-OS-000041-GPOS-00019, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00021, SRG-OS-000055-GPOS-00026, SRG-OS-000254-GPOS-00095, SRG-OS-000255-GPOS-00096, SRG-OS-000257-GPOS-00098, SRG-OS-000258-GPOS-00099, SRG-OS-000337-GPOS-00129, SRG-OS-000358-GPOS-00145, SRG-OS-000359-GPOS-00146, SRG-OS-000365-GPOS-00152, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000458-GPOS-00203, SRG-OS-000461-GPOS-00205, SRG-OS-000462-GPOS-00206, SRG-OS-000463-GPOS-00207, SRG-OS-000465-GPOS-00209, SRG-OS-000466-GPOS-00210, SRG-OS-000467-GPOS-00211, SRG-OS-000468-GPOS-00212, SRG-OS-000470-GPOS-00214, SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00215, SRG-OS-000471-GPOS-00216, SRG-OS-000472-GPOS-00217, SRG-OS-000473-GPOS-00218, SRG-OS-000474-GPOS-00219, SRG-OS-000475-GPOS-00220, SRG-OS-000476-GPOS-00221, SRG-OS-000477-GPOS-00222, SRG-OS-000755-GPOS-00220

Check

Verify the macOS system is configured to enable the auditd service with the following command:

LAUNCHD_RUNNING=$(/bin/launchctl print system | /usr/bin/grep -c -E '\tcom.apple.auditd') AUDITD_RUNNING=$(/usr/sbin/audit -c | /usr/bin/grep -c "AUC_AUDITING") if [[ $LAUNCHD_RUNNING == 1 ]] && [[ -e /etc/security/audit_control ]] && [[ $AUDITD_RUNNING == 1 ]]; then echo "pass" else echo "fail" fi

If the result is not "pass", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the macOS system to enable the auditd service with the following command:

if [[ ! -e /etc/security/audit_control ]] && [[ -e /etc/security/audit_control.example ]];then /bin/cp /etc/security/audit_control.example /etc/security/audit_control fi

/bin/launchctl enable system/com.apple.auditd /bin/launchctl bootstrap system /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.auditd.plist /usr/sbin/audit -i

Identifiers

Group ID
V-277062
Group title
SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015
Rule ID
SV-277062r1149405_rule
Check ID
C-81217r1149356_chk
Fix ID
F-81122r1148637_fix