Abstract

Completing the Common Criteria CAPP (C2) security evaluation of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system required the development of a significant new operating system feature, security event auditing. This facility provides for the fine-grained, configurable, and reliable logging of security events ranging from authentication events in user space to system call access control information throughout the kernel. As the leader for the team that implemented Audit for Apple, I had the opportunity to gain interesting insight into the evaluation requirements and process, as well as into the implementation implications of these requirements. This presentation will describe the requirements and how they have been implemented in traditional UNIX systems, as well as how some of the design decisions that make Mac OS X unique impacted the implementation of Audit. I’ll also talk briefly about the later port of this source code base to the open source FreeBSD operating system, and the OpenBSM software package, which provides a portable implementation of the de facto industry standard BSM API and file format originally developed by Sun.