Re: Auditing user session activity

[tie <tie () ankh morp org>]

Hi Jeffrey,

The easiest way for you to go would be to start using URL (i.e. not 
cookie based) sessions. In this way, you will have the Session ID track 
inside your web server log file.

Then, in your login script you will just have to record username and 
SID, upon successful login.

In this way, you can match the lines from the web server log against the 
usernames recorded by your  login script.

Regards,
tie

Koniszewski, Jeffrey wrote:

> 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.
>
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