knox

Tools to repurpose system auditing for non-security uses. Allows observability and introspection into processes and their lifecycle, granular file access, causes or sources of errors, info about networking use, and more. Based on macOS system auditing API "Basic Security Module" (aka BSM).

Introduction

macOS has a system library called libbsm, which is a lesser known API for security auditing and monitoring. This same data is potentially useful for much more. Like what exactly? Well, that's why this repo exists -- to explore the possibilities and to provide tools, libraries, and documentation for working with libbsm.

Some interesting uses for libbsm are: observing and reacting to process lifecycle, visualizing file access across the life of a process, visibility of internal process errors, etc. This kind of data has been available via dtrace, using libbsm is still interesting because it has different programming ergonomics, and has different tradeoffs.

Install

brew install --HEAD kastiglione/formulae/knox

Tools

auditpipe

Opens and configures the audit event firehose: /dev/auditpipe. The auditpipe command takes a set of event classes, and writes all matching events to stdout. A quick example to consider:

auditpipe pc,fc | praudit -lx

Using praudit (ships with macOS), this prints process events ("pc" event class) and file creation events ("fc" event class). See Event Classes for a list. The process event class includes syscalls such as fork, execve, posix_spawn, kill, exit, and more. The syscalls and their associated event classes are listed in /etc/security/audit_event.

As described in man audit_control, event classes can be formatted as "comma-delimited list". Additionally, event classes can be prefixed with + to show only successful events, or - to show only failed events. See "Audit Flags" in man audit_control for full details.

The complete list of event classes can be found in /etc/security/audit_classes. See Event Classes for an overview:

Examples

Print successful process events:

auditpipe +pc | praudit -lx

Print failed file reads and writes, and filters to the given path prefix:

auditpipe -fr,-fw | praudit -lx | grep /Users/me

commands

If you ever need to see which commands are being run by other processes, this is the tool to do that. Prints the command lines for all processes. The commands tool reads log files, for example those in /var/audit, or if no log file is provided commands shows live commands via /dev/auditpipe.

Examples

commands
commands /var/audit/current

auditon

The auditon command is a command line interface to the auditon(2) API. It's useful for some advanced use cases (TODO: document these). See the source and man page for details.

Audit Log

/dev/auditpipe is useful for live observing events. Additionally, BSM can also be configured to log events to /var/audit, and this is useful to look back in time for events matching some criteria. To configure the audit logs, see man audit_control and edit /etc/security/audit_control. Note that some settings take effect on login, so logout/login can be required to have settings take effect. Other settings, such as file size limits, can be applied by running sudo audit -s.

Documentation

The majority of documentation is in the BSM headers (bsm/libbsm.h) and manual pages (see below). Most of the Audit man pages are available only when Xcode is installed. The xnu source can also be hepful.

• man auditpipe
• man audit.log
• man audit_class
• man audit_control
• man praudit
• man auditon
• man auditreduce

grep can find more man pages:

cd $(xcrun --show-sdk-path)/usr/share/man
grep -rl '\bau_' .

Limitiations

• The audit token for exec args is limited to a max of 128 arguments
• During high load, /dev/auditpipe can drop events if its queue is full
• /dev/auditpipe provides events for the current user, not root

Event Classes

Name	Description
fr	file read
fw	file write
fa	file attribute access
fm	file attribute modify
fc	file create
fd	file delete
cl	file close
pc	process
nt	network
ip	ipc
ad	administrative
lo	login_logout
aa	authentication and authorization
ap	application
io	ioctl
ex	exec
ot	miscellaneous
all	all flags set

Permissions

Root permissinos are required to access /dev/auditpipe and the logs in /var/audit. To avoid needing a password to use these, there are two options:

1. Make the binaries setuid
2. Add config in /etc/sudoers

setuid

To make auditpipe setuid, run:

sudo chown root auditpipe
sudo chmod +s auditpipe

sudo

Where necessary, knox commands will re-exec with sudo, prompting the user to enter their password, if necessary.

To make sudo auditpipe require no password, run sudo visudo and then add:

yourusername	ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/auditpipe *

Why "knox"

The Audit API types and functions are prefixed with "au", and Au is the chemical symbol for gold. One place to find gold is at Fort Knox. But really, all of this provides a line of reasoning to pay some small homage to my super awesome grandma, whose maiden name was Knox.