STIGUI
V-282408CAT II — Medium severitySV-282408r1201539_rule

TOSS 5 must audit all uses of the pam_timestamp_check command.

Rule version TOSS-05-000432 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-20

Discussion

Without generating audit records 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).

When a user logs on, the auid is set to the uid of the account 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.

The system call rules are loaded into a matching engine that intercepts each system call made by all programs on the system. Therefore, it is very important to use system call rules only when absolutely necessary since these affect performance. The more rules, the bigger the performance hit. The performance can be helped, however, by combining system calls into one rule whenever possible.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015, SRG-OS-000042-GPOS-00020, SRG-OS-000062-GPOS-00031, SRG-OS-000392-GPOS-00172, SRG-OS-000477-GPOS-00222

Check

Verify that TOSS 5 is configured to audit the execution of the "pam_timestamp_check" command with the following command:

$ sudo auditctl -l | grep timestamp

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

If the command does not return a line or the line is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure TOSS 5 to generate audit records upon successful/unsuccessful attempts to use the "pam_timestamp_check" command by adding or updating the following rule in "/etc/audit/rules.d/audit.rules":

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

Restart the audit daemon for changes to take effect.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-282408
Group title
SRG-OS-000037-GPOS-00015
Rule ID
SV-282408r1201539_rule
Check ID
C-86969r1201443_chk
Fix ID
F-86874r1201538_fix