On Jun 13, 2012, at 11:53 PM, Shawn Wells wrote:

> I received this note from a colleague today regarding content in the 
> scap-security-guide for RHEL6:
> 
>> Ext4 mounts devices with the relatime option by default.  Probably not a 
>> good idea for secure environments.  Means atime is not accurate.  Very bad 
>> for systems using AIDE.  RHEL 6 security guide needs to turn atime back on 
>> for Ext4 mounts.  
>> 
>> cat /proc/mounts
>> 
>> Sent from iPhone.  
>> 
> 
> When he states that "atime is not accurate" I believe he's referring to how 
> relatime maintains atime data, but not for each time the file was accessed. 
> Only modified. 
> 
> From a performance perspective relatime makes a lot of sense. Enablement of 
> relatime means that the filesystem will not write read-times to a file when 
> read. Imagine recording every time a file in hadoop or a highly utilized 
> fileshare was read... that could be a lot of overhead which relatime prevents.
> 
> With that said, we're writing a security guide and not a performance guide. 
> What does everyone think about this, and what should we do? One option is to 
> set "default_relatime=0" in grub to prevent any filesystem from doing this. 
> Is that overkill?

Overkill

Audit rules record when something you care about has been accessed.

joe
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