STIGUI
V-248765CAT II — Medium severitySV-248765r958442_rule

OL 8 must generate audit records for any use of the "setfiles" command.

Rule version OL08-00-030314 · STIG v2 · 2026-08-24

Discussion

Reconstruction of harmful events or forensic analysis is not possible if audit records do not contain enough information.

At a minimum, the organization must audit the full-text recording of privileged commands. The organization must maintain audit trails in sufficient detail to reconstruct events to determine the cause and impact of compromise. The "setfiles" command is primarily used to initialize the security context fields (extended attributes) on one or more filesystems (or parts of them). Usually it is initially run as part of the SELinux installation process (a step commonly known as labeling).

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.

Check

Verify OL 8 is configured to audit the execution of the "setfiles" command by running the following command:

$ sudo grep -w setfiles /etc/audit/audit.rules 

-a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/setfiles -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-unix-update

If the command does not return all lines or the lines are commented out, this is a finding.

Note: The "-k" allows for specifying an arbitrary identifier, and the string after it does not need to match the example output above.

Fix

Configure OL 8 to audit the execution of the "setfiles" command by adding or updating the following lines to "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules":

-a always,exit -F path=/usr/sbin/setfiles -F perm=x -F auid>=1000 -F auid!=unset -k privileged-unix-update

The audit daemon must be restarted for the changes to take effect. To restart the audit daemon, run the following command:

$ sudo service auditd restart

Identifiers

Group ID
V-248765
Group title
SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031
Rule ID
SV-248765r958442_rule
Check ID
C-52199r779859_chk
Fix ID
F-52153r779860_fix