Endpoint monitoring solutions (e.g., Elastic, Splunk) are widely deployed in today’s enterprise environments to support advanced attack detection and investigation. These monitors continuously record system-level activities as audit logs and provide deep visibility into security incidents.
Note that audit logs are different from application logs, which are generated by the application code at the developer's will. Audit logs are generated by the Operating system regardless of the application's code.
I highly suggest the beginners start their log analysis journey from Backtracking intrusions as this study is the pioneer at this line of research.
The DARPA dataset is a publicly available APT attack dataset released by the DARPA Transparent Computing (TC) program. The dataset was derived from a network of hosts during a two-week-long red-team vs. blue-team adversarial Engagement.
- Threat Detection and Investigation with System-level Provenance Graphs: A Survey. Zhenyuan, et al. Computer & Security'2021 paper
- SoK: History is a Vast Early Warning System: Auditing the Provenance of System Intrusions, Muhammad Adil Inam, et al. SP'2023 paper
Every event in audit logs represents an OS-level system activity such as process creation, file access, and network connection. Here, we use read and execve activities as examples to illustrate log events.
READ Event:
type=PROCTITLE msg=audit(08/26/19 20:34:53.383:98866813) : proctitle=bash
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(08/26/19 20:34:53.383:98866813) : arch=x86_64 syscall=read success=yes exit=25 a0=0x3 a1=0x7ffedcf386a0 a2=0x80 a3=0x7fa5c53f19d0 items=0 ppid=15757 pid=30204 auid=junzeng uid=root gid=root euid=root suid=root fsuid=root egid=root sgid=root fsgid=root tty=pts21 ses=6309 comm=service exe=/bin/dash key=(null)
EXECVE Event:
type=PROCTITLE msg=audit(16/05/2019 16:18:30.752:49036555) : proctitle=ls /etc/bash_completion.d
type=PATH msg=audit(16/05/2019 16:18:30.752:49036555) : item=1 name=/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 inode=135768 dev=08:05 mode=file,755 ouid=root ogid=root rdev=00:00 nametype=NORMAL cap_fp=none cap_fi=none cap_fe=0 cap_fver=0
type=PATH msg=audit(16/05/2019 16:18:30.752:49036555) : item=0 name=/bin/ls inode=6815827 dev=08:05 mode=file,755 ouid=root ogid=root rdev=00:00 nametype=NORMAL cap_fp=none cap_fi=none cap_fe=0 cap_fver=0
type=CWD msg=audit(16/05/2019 16:18:30.752:49036555) : cwd=/home/junzeng
type=EXECVE msg=audit(16/05/2019 16:18:30.752:49036555) : argc=2 a0=ls a1=/etc/bash_completion.d
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(16/05/2019 16:18:30.752:49036555) : arch=x86_64 syscall=execve success=yes exit=0 a0=0x170e168 a1=0x1847cc8 a2=0x1807008 a3=0x598 items=2 ppid=10738 pid=10739 auid=junzeng uid=junzeng gid=junzeng euid=junzeng suid=junzeng fsuid=junzeng egid=junzeng sgid=junzeng fsgid=junzeng tty=pts21 ses=287 comm=ls exe=/bin/ls key=(null)
Linux
Auditd/Auditbeat: kernel-level tracing facility for Linux. Here is a simplified version of auditd rules used in our research project WATSON.Windows
ETW: kernel-level tracing facility for WindowsFreeBSD
Dtrace: kernel-level tracing facility for FreeBSD
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