April 28, 2013
Conference Paper

AIDE - Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment

Abstract

Would you like to know when someone has dropped an undesirable executable binary on our system? What about something less malicious such as a software installation by a user? What about the user who decides to install a newer version of mod_perl or PHP on your web server without letting you know beforehand? Or even something as simple as when an undocumented config file change is made by another member of the admin group? Do you even want to know about all the changes that happen on a daily basis on your server? The purpose of an intrusion detection system (IDS) is to detect unauthorized, possibly malicious activity. The purpose of a host-based IDS, or file integrity checker, is check for unauthorized changes to key system files, binaries, libraries, and directories on the system. AIDE is an Open Source file and directory integrity checker. AIDE will let you know when a file or directory has been added, deleted, modified. It is included with the Red Hat Enterprise 6. It is available for other Linux distros. This is a case study describing the process of configuring AIDE on an out of the box RHEL6 installation. Its goal is to illustrate the thinking and the process by which a useful AIDE configuration is built.

Revised: July 22, 2014 | Published: April 28, 2013

Citation

Smith C.L. 2013. AIDE - Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment. In LinuxFest Northwest 2013, April 27-28, 2013, Bellingham, Washington. Bellingham, Washington:Bellingham Technical College. PNNL-SA-95220.