WebApp Sec mailing list archives
RE: Auditing user session activity
From: Paul Berube <pberube () riskmetrics com>
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 08:07:34 -0400
We have a similar requirement for a product offering we support. To address this, the apache logs have been modified to include a user id obtained from the authentication system (Netegrity - Siteminder). The formats of the logs have also been adjusted so that they can be queried directly by a relational database server (in this case, Oracle). By mapping the URLs to more meaningful page names, we are able to exlcude requests for things like images and style sheets and focus the reports on items that are meaningful to the consumers of the information. The reports also become more usable. We get some added benefits from this such as historical page performance relative to request size and browser utilization. -----Original Message----- From: Koniszewski, Jeffrey [mailto:JKoniszewski () Kronos com] Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 4:10 PM To: webappsec () securityfocus com Subject: Auditing user session activity We are being asked by our customers to audit session activity so that customers can answer the question, "Who is doing what?". Our current implementation for this is to write audit records to the database. However, I am having some second thoughts about this. This requires a database hit for every non static URL access to the system. I'm not sure of the overall runtime performance impact. Further, for enterprise class customers the audit records are likely to exceed 2G per month. This creates a lot of data cleanup to manage. In addition, reporting on this data may require a lot of overhead from the system. Any thoughts on likely retention policies for such audit data? Users must log in to our application and we maintain session state. We do integrate with Single Sign On products like Netegrity. I am rolling around a couple of ideas: One is that session audit is not a primary application problem and not application data. Can this capability (session audit) be delivered by an external application (IDS?, SSO product?) that is dedicated to do this type of work. Then the customers that want the capability install it, probably get a more professional implementation, and use it for other applications as well. What security applications can provide this type of audit? Web server logs can provide URL access information but don't know users. It seems that whatever writes the audit would need to manage user logon as well to be able to associate the user with the activity. The second idea is, would I be better off using a file for the audit information? This introduces a bunch of file management headaches in a multiserver system but takes a load off the database, which is already our bottleneck.
Current thread:
- Auditing user session activity Koniszewski, Jeffrey (Oct 05)
- Re: Auditing user session activity tie (Oct 07)
- Re: Auditing user session activity Antonio Varni (Oct 09)
- Re: Auditing user session activity Matt Fisher (Oct 12)
- Re: Auditing user session activity Antonio Varni (Oct 15)
- Re: Auditing user session activity Antonio Varni (Oct 09)
- Re: Auditing user session activity tie (Oct 07)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: Auditing user session activity Michael Silk (Oct 07)
- RE: Auditing user session activity Paul Berube (Oct 07)
- Re: Auditing user session activity Leigh Morresi (Oct 09)
- Re: Auditing user session activity Daniel Souza (Oct 12)
- Re: Auditing user session activity Leigh Morresi (Oct 09)
- Auditing user session activity najeeb . hatami (Oct 14)