STIGUI
V-258836CAT II — Medium severitySV-258836r991555_rule

The Photon operating system must initiate session audits at system startup.

Rule version PHTN-40-000080 · STIG v2 · 2026-08-26

Discussion

If auditing is enabled late in the startup process, the actions of some startup processes may not be audited. Some audit systems also maintain state information only available if auditing is enabled before a given process is created.

Check

At the command line, run the following command to verify auditing is enabled at startup:

# grep 'audit' /proc/cmdline

Example result:

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10.109-2.ph4-esx root=PARTUUID=6e6293c6-9ab6-49e9-aa97-9b212f2e037a init=/lib/systemd/systemd rcupdate.rcu_expedited=1 rw systemd.show_status=1 quiet noreplace-smp cpu_init_udelay=0 plymouth.enable=0 systemd.legacy_systemd_cgroup_controller=yes audit=1

If the "audit" parameter is not present with a value of "1", this is a finding.

Fix

Navigate to and open:

/boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Locate the boot command line arguments. An example follows:

linux /boot/$photon_linux root=$rootpartition $photon_cmdline $systemd_cmdline

Add "audit=1" to the end of the line so it reads as follows:

linux /boot/$photon_linux root=$rootpartition $photon_cmdline $systemd_cmdline audit=1

Note: Do not copy/paste in this example argument line. This may change in future releases. Find the similar line and append "audit=1" to it.

Reboot the system for the change to take effect.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-258836
Group title
SRG-OS-000254-GPOS-00095
Rule ID
SV-258836r991555_rule
Check ID
C-62576r933567_chk
Fix ID
F-62485r933568_fix