STIGUI
V-230412CAT II — Medium severitySV-230412r1017218_rule

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

Rule version RHEL-08-030190 · STIG v2 · 2026-05-20

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

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

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.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-230412
Group title
SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031
Rule ID
SV-230412r1017218_rule
Check ID
C-33081r567982_chk
Fix ID
F-33056r567983_fix