Audit Records and Audit Tokens

Each audit record describes the occurrence of a single audited event. The record includes information such as who did the action, which files were affected, what action was attempted, and where and when the action occurred. For example, the following line shows an audit record when processed by the praudit command:

header,81,2,login - local,,Mon May  6 16:55:48 PDT 2002, + 486 msec
subject,root,root,other,root,other,378,378,0 0 example_machine
text,successful login
return,success,0

Audit records are collected in an audit file. The set of audit files from a machine or site is called the audit trail. For a description of how audit files are handled, see the audit.log(4) man page. Audit records can be converted to a readable format by the praudit command. For examples of praudit output, see The praudit Command. See also the praudit(1M) man page.

The type of information that is saved for each audit event is defined in a set of audit tokens. Each time an audit record is created for an event, the record contains some or all of the tokens that are defined for the event. The nature of the event determines which tokens are recorded. You can generate audit record descriptions with the bsmrecord command. The following output shows the structure of the audit record that is generated when the creat() system call is used. The lines beginning with header are the audit tokens.

creat
  system call creat                see creat(2)
  event ID    4                    AUE_CREAT
  class       fc                   (0x00000010)
      header
      path
      [attribute]
      subject
      return

For more information, see How to Display Audit Record Formats. For a description of the structure of each audit token, see Audit Token Formats. The audit.log(4) man page also lists the audit tokens.