System Administration Guide: Security Services

Audit Classes and Preselection

Each audit event belongs to an audit class or classes. Audit classes are convenient containers for large numbers of audit events. When you preselect a class to be audited, you specify that all the events in that class should be recorded in the audit trail. You can preselect for events on a system and for events initiated by a particular user. After the audit service is running, you can dynamically add or remove audit classes from the preselected classes.

A postselection command, auditreduce, enables you to select records from the preselected audit records. For more information, see Examining the Audit Trail and the auditreduce(1M) man page.

Audit classes are defined in the /etc/security/audit_class file. Each entry contains the audit mask for the class, the name for the class, and a descriptive name for the class. For example, the ps and na class definitions appear in the audit_class file as follows:


0x00100000:ps:process start/stop
0x00000400:na:non-attribute

There are 32 possible audit classes. The classes include the two global classes: all and no. The audit classes are described in the audit_class(4) man page.

The mapping of audit events to classes is configurable. You can remove events from a class, add events to a class, and create a new class to contain selected events. For the procedure, see How to Change an Audit Event's Class Membership.