STIGUI
V-258152CAT II — Medium severitySV-258152r1268225_rule

RHEL 9 audit service must be enabled.

Rule version RHEL-09-653015 · STIG v2 · 2026-09-17

Discussion

Without establishing what type of events occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. Ensuring the "auditd" service is active ensures audit records generated by the kernel are appropriately recorded.

Additionally, a properly configured audit subsystem ensures that actions of individual system users can be uniquely traced to those users so they can be held accountable for their actions.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, 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-00021, SRG-OS-000051-GPOS-00024, SRG-OS-000054-GPOS-00025, SRG-OS-000122-GPOS-00063, SRG-OS-000254-GPOS-00095, SRG-OS-000255-GPOS-00096, SRG-OS-000337-GPOS-00129, SRG-OS-000348-GPOS-00136, SRG-OS-000349-GPOS-00137, SRG-OS-000350-GPOS-00138, SRG-OS-000351-GPOS-00139, SRG-OS-000352-GPOS-00140, SRG-OS-000353-GPOS-00141, SRG-OS-000354-GPOS-00142, SRG-OS-000358-GPOS-00145, SRG-OS-000365-GPOS-00152, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000475-GPOS-00220

Check

Verify the audit service is configured to produce audit records with the following command:

$ systemctl status auditd.service

auditd.service - Security Auditing Service Loaded:loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/auditd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (running) since Tues 2022-05-24 12:56:56 EST; 4 weeks 0 days ago

If the audit service is not "active" and "running", this is a finding.

Fix

To enable the auditd service run the following command:

$ sudo systemctl enable --now auditd

Identifiers

Group ID
V-258152
Group title
SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031
Rule ID
SV-258152r1268225_rule
Check ID
C-61893r926441_chk
Fix ID
F-61817r926442_fix