praudit Command

The praudit command makes the binary output of the auditreduce command readable. The praudit command reads audit records in binary format from standard input and displays the records in a presentable format. The input can be piped from the auditreduce command or from a single audit file. Input can also be produced with the cat command to concatenate several files, or the tail command for a current audit file.

The praudit command can generate four output formats. A fifth option, -l (long), prints one audit record per line of output. The default is to place one audit token per line of output. The -d option changes the delimiter that is used between token fields and between tokens. The default delimiter is a comma.

• Default – The praudit command with no options displays one audit token per line. The command displays the audit event by its description, such as the ioctl(2) system call. Any value that can be displayed as text is displayed in text format. For example, a user is displayed as the user name, not as the user ID.

• –r option – The raw option displays as a number any value that could be numeric. For example, a user is displayed by user ID, Internet addresses are in hexadecimal format, and modes are in octal format. The audit event is displayed as its event number, such as 158.

• –s option – The short option displays the audit event by its table name, for example, AUE_IOCTL. The option displays the other tokens as the default option displays them.

• –x option – The XML option displays the audit record in XML format. This option is useful as input to browsers, or as input to scripts that manipulate XML.

  The XML is described by a DTD that the audit service provides. Solaris software also provides a style sheet. The DTD and the style sheet are in the /usr/share/lib/xml directory.

In the default output format of the praudit command, each record is easily identified as a sequence of audit tokens. Each token is presented on a separate line. Each record begins with a header token. You could, for example, further process the output with the awk command.

Here is the output from the praudit -l command for a header token:

header,173,2,settppriv(2),,example1,2003-10-13 13:46:02.174 -07:00

Here is the output from the praudit -r command for the same header token:

121,173,2,289,0x0000,192.168.86.166,1066077962,174352445

Example 31–1 Processing praudit Output With a Script

You might want to process output from the praudit command as lines of text. For example, you might want to select records that the auditreduce command cannot select. You can use a simple shell script to process the output of the praudit command. The following simple example script puts one audit record on one line, searches for a user-specified string, then returns the audit file to its original form.

#!/bin/sh
#
## This script takes an argument of a user-specified string.
#  The sed command prefixes the header tokens with Control-A
#  The first tr command puts the audit tokens for one record 
#  onto one line while preserving the line breaks as Control-A
#
praudit | sed -e '1,2d' -e '$s/^file.*$//' -e 's/^header/^aheader/' \\
| tr '\\012\\001' '\\002\\012' \\
| grep "$1" \\ Finds the user-specified string
| tr '\\002' '\\012' Restores the original newline breaks

Note that the ^a in the script is Control-A, not the two characters ^ and a. The prefix distinguishes the header token from the string header that might appear as text.