This page describes an older version of the product. The latest stable version is 16.4.

Auditing


XAP provides the ability to audit the authentication requests and operations performed on a secured service. It facilitates the logging mechanism to declare the audit log file, and the level of auditing. The level can be dynamically modified using the java.util.logging JMX Extensions. This allows an easy extension for custom auditing.

Note

Currently auditing of operations is limited to Space operations.

Configuration

The configurations should be placed in the logging configuration file <XAP root>/config/gs_logging.properties.

# gs_logging.properties

com.gigaspaces.security.audit.enabled = true
com.gigaspaces.security.audit.level = SEVERE
com.gigaspaces.security.audit.handler = com.gigaspaces.security.audit.AuditHandler

This configuration can also be supplied using system properties.

-Dcom.gigaspaces.security.audit.enabled=true -Dcom.gigaspaces.security.audit.level=SEVERE ...

The defaults of these configurations are:

com.gigaspaces.security.audit.enabled Enable/Disable security auditing; default is disabled (false)
com.gigaspaces.security.audit.level Audit level of interest; default is OFF
com.gigaspaces.security.audit.handler The Audit java.util.logging.Handler implementation accepting an AuditLogRecord; default is AuditHandler

The AuditHandler is a declarable extension to the default GigaSpaces logging Handler (see GigaSpaces Logging). As such, it accepts properties that configure the handler - amongst others are the logging message formatter and the filename-pattern.

# gs_logging.properties

...
com.gigaspaces.security.audit.handler = com.gigaspaces.security.audit.AuditHandler

# Properties configuring the audit-handler:

com.gigaspaces.security.audit.AuditHandler.formatter = com.gigaspaces.logger.GSSimpleFormatter
com.gigaspaces.security.audit.AuditHandler.filename-pattern = {homedir}/logs/gigaspaces-security-audit-{service}-{host}-{pid}.log

Audit Levels

OFF Nothing is audited
SEVERE Authentication failure or invalid session
WARNING Access denied due to insufficient privileges
INFO Authentication successful
FINE Access granted

Example

In the example below, there are two users “writer” (only privileges to write), and “reader” (only privileges to read).


FINE: Access granted; user [writer] at host [some-pc.gspaces.com/192.168.10.172] has [Write] privileges for class [com.gigaspaces.data.car.CarPojo]; session-id [827282038]
18/12/2014 12:23:50 com.gigaspaces.security.audit.SecurityAudit accessGranted

If the writer tries to read, you get a denied message:
WARNING: Access denied; user [writer] at host [some-pc.gspaces.com/192.168.10.172] lacks [Read] privileges for class [com.gigaspaces.data.car.CarPojo]; session-id [827282038]
18/12/2014 12:23:51 com.gigaspaces.security.audit.SecurityAudit accessDenied

Same goes to the reader
WARNING: Access denied; user [reader] at host [some-pc.gspaces.com/192.168.10.172] lacks [Write] privileges for class [com.gigaspaces.data.car.CarPojo]; session-id [1003653583]
18/12/2014 12:23:51 com.gigaspaces.security.audit.SecurityAudit accessDenied

And
FINE: Access granted; user [reader] at host [some-pc.gspaces.com/192.168.10.172] has [Read] privileges for class [com.gigaspaces.data.car.CarPojo]; session-id [1003653583]
18/12/2014 12:23:51 com.gigaspaces.security.audit.SecurityAudit accessGranted

See also:

You can see that for each write operation an audit FINE log message is created with the classname. There is no data in the audit details. If you need the data to be audited, you can apply a filter to achieve this.

Custom Auditing

The java.util.logging.Handler accepts a java.util.logging.LogRecord for logging. An AuditLogRecord is supplied by the security layer containing the AuditDetails. Instead of logging into a file, a custom Handler can capture all the log activity for auditing. By default the java.util.logging.LogRecord.getMessage() of AuditLogRecord contains the audit message (as shown in the sample output above).