As recently mentioned, Linux audit logs[1] are fairly hideous, and although machine readability may have been a design goal, I'd argue they're not too friendly in that regard either. I suspect, in fact, that the principal driver has been machine producability ;)

I've noticed that a number of utilities cook the logs slightly. I've shied away from this to date because I want to be able to leverage existing tools. However, if some standard emerged (or has emerged and I missed it) for cooked logs, I'd be extremely interested in implementing that.

Simple starters would include:
* Translating the architecture and syscall names into human.
* Jumping one way or the other with the hex strings business.
* Translating socket addresses into human.
* Translating timestamps into human.
* Ditching uninteresting records, such as PATH with no name for the dynamic linker, and 2 PATH records when execing a script.

with an ultimate goal of:
* Defining an expected set of data for every system call and putting them all on a single line in a well defined format.

Is anybody doing any work in this direction?

Matt

[1] Of course, they're really accounting logs produced by the accounting daemon. If you actually audit your accounting logs, this seemingly pedantic point can become quite confusing.
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Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
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