Systemd is a more modern replacement of sysvinit and its in the process of being integrated into most mainstream Linux distributions. I'm a bit troubled by one of it's features.
I'd like to discuss the Forward Secure Sealing (FSS) feature for log files that is part of systemd. FSS cryptographically signs the local system logs, so you can check if log files have been altered. This should make it more difficult for an attacker to hide his or her tracks.
Regarding log files, an attacker can do two things:
- delete them
- alter them (remove / change incriminating lines)
The FSS feature does not prevent any of these risks. But it does help you detect that there is something fishy going on if you would verify the signatures regularly. So basically FSS acts a bit like Tripwire.
FSS can only tell you wether or not a log file has been changed. It cannot tell you anything else. More specifically, it cannot tell you the reason why. So I wonder how valuable this feature is.
There is also something else. Signing (sealing) a log file is done every 15 minutes by default. This gives an attacker ample time to alter or delete the most recent log events, often exactly those events that need to be altered/deleted. Even lowering this number to 10 seconds would allow an attacker to delete (some) initial activities using automation. So how useful is this?
What may help in determining what happened to a system is the unaltered log contents themselves. What FSS cannot do by principle is protect the actual contents of the log file. If you want to preserve log events the only secure option is to send them to an external log host (assumed not accessible by an attacker).
However, to my surprise, FSS is presented as an alternative to external logging. Quote from Lennart Poettering:
Traditionally this problem has been dealt with by having an external secured log server
to instantly log to, or even a local line printer directly connected to the log system.
But these solutions are more complex to set up, require external infrastructure and have
certain scalability problems. With FSS we now have a simple alternative that works without
any external infrastructure.
This quote is quite troubling because it fails to acknowledge one of the raison d'être of external log hosts. It seems to suggest that FSS provides an alternative for external logging, where in fact it does not and cannot do so on principle. It can never address the fact that an attacker can alter or delete logs, whereas external logging can mitigate this risk.
It seems to me that systemd now also wants to play the role as some crude intrusion detection system. It feels a bit like scope creep to me.
Personally I just wonder what more useful features could have been implemented instead of allowing you to transfer a log file verification key using a QR code to your smartphone (What the hell?).
This whole observation is not original, in the comments of the systemd author's blogpost, the same argument is made by Andrew Wyatt (two years earlier). The response from the systemd author was to block him. (see the comments of Lennart Poettering's blogpost I linked to earlier).
Update: Andrew Wyatt behaved a bit immature towards Lennart Poettering at first so I understand some resentment from his side, but Andrews criticism was valid and never addressed by him.
If the systemd author would just have implemented sending log events to an external log server, that would have been way more useful security-wise, I think. Until then, this may do...
