PostgreSQL must produce audit records containing time stamps to establish when the events occurred.

Information system auditing capability is critical for accurate forensic analysis. Without establishing when events occurred, it is impossible to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident.

To compile an accurate risk assessment and provide forensic analysis, it is essential for security personnel to know the date and time when events occurred.

Associating the date and time with detected events in the application and audit logs provides a means of investigating an attack; recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds; or identifying an improperly configured application.

PostgreSQL is capable of a range of actions on data stored within the database. It is important, for accurate forensic analysis, to know exactly when specific actions were performed. This requires the date and time an audit record is referring to. If date and time information is not recorded and stored with the audit record, the record itself is of very limited use.

As the database administrator (usually postgres), run the following SQL:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ psql -c "SHOW log_line_prefix"

If the query result does not contain "%m", this is a finding.

Note: The following instructions use the PGDATA and PGVER environment variables. Refer to APPENDIX-F for instructions on configuring PGDATA and APPENDIX-H for PGVER.

Logging must be enabled to capture timestamps. To ensure logging is enabled, see the instructions in the supplementary content APPENDIX-C.

If logging is enabled, the following configurations must be made to log events with timestamps:

As the database administrator (shown here as "postgres"), edit postgresql.conf:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ vi ${PGDATA?}/postgresql.conf

Add %m to log_line_prefix to enable timestamps with milliseconds:

log_line_prefix = '< %m >'

As the system administrator, reload the server with the new configuration:

$ sudo systemctl reload postgresql-${PGVER?}