| It is essential for security personnel to know what is being done, what was attempted, where it was done, when it was done, and by whom it was done in order to compile an accurate risk assessment. Associating event types with detected events in the logs provides a means of investigating an attack, recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or identifying an improperly configured firewall. Without this capability, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events related to an outage or attack.
Please note the distinction between logging and auditing; they are not the same, but they are closely related; auditing is a part of logging. Logging is recording data about events that take place in a system, while auditing is the use of log records to identify security relevant information such as system or user accesses. In short, log records are audited to establish an accurate history. Without logging, it would be impossible to establish an audit trail.
Log records must provide the originating IP address (loopback or management interface), process or facility, node or device name, and account (if available) as accurately as possible. Additionally, for log messages generated as a result of an ACL/rule match, the firewall implementation must identify the specific ACL/rule entry that generated the log message. Since log records for an ACL match include source and destination IP addresses of the traffic, this further identifies the source of the suspicious or unauthorized traffic. |
