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Assessment Title
Rule Text
SQL Server must generate Trace or Audit records when unsuccessful attempts to execute privileged activities or other system-level access occur.
Description
Discussion Text
Without tracking privileged activity, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events relating to an incident or identify those responsible for one.
To aid in diagnosis, it is necessary to keep track of failed attempts in addition to the successful ones.
System documentation should include a definition of the functionality considered privileged.
A privileged function in this context is any operation that modifies the structure of the database, its built-in logic, or its security settings. This would include all Data Definition Language (DDL) statements and all security-related statements. This encompasses, but is not necessarily limited to:
CREATE
ALTER
DROP
GRANT
REVOKE
DENY
There may also be Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements that, subject to context, should be regarded as privileged. Possible examples in SQL include:
TRUNCATE TABLE;
DELETE, or
DELETE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or
DELETE without a WHERE clause;
UPDATE or
UPDATE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or
UPDATE without a WHERE clause;
any SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to an application-defined security table executed by other than a security principal.
Note that it is particularly important to audit, and tightly control, any action that weakens the implementation of this requirement itself, since the objective is to have a complete audit trail of all administrative activity.
Use of SQL Server Audit is recommended. All features of SQL Server Audit are available in the Enterprise and Developer editions of SQL Server 2014. It is not available at the database level in other editions. For this or legacy reasons, the instance may be using SQL Server Trace for auditing, which remains an acceptable solution for the time being. Note, however, that Microsoft intends to remove most aspects of Trace at some point after SQL Server 2016.
To aid in diagnosis, it is necessary to keep track of failed attempts in addition to the successful ones.
System documentation should include a definition of the functionality considered privileged.
A privileged function in this context is any operation that modifies the structure of the database, its built-in logic, or its security settings. This would include all Data Definition Language (DDL) statements and all security-related statements. This encompasses, but is not necessarily limited to:
CREATE
ALTER
DROP
GRANT
REVOKE
DENY
There may also be Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements that, subject to context, should be regarded as privileged. Possible examples in SQL include:
TRUNCATE TABLE;
DELETE, or
DELETE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or
DELETE without a WHERE clause;
UPDATE or
UPDATE affecting more than n rows, for some n, or
UPDATE without a WHERE clause;
any SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to an application-defined security table executed by other than a security principal.
Note that it is particularly important to audit, and tightly control, any action that weakens the implementation of this requirement itself, since the objective is to have a complete audit trail of all administrative activity.
Use of SQL Server Audit is recommended. All features of SQL Server Audit are available in the Enterprise and Developer editions of SQL Server 2014. It is not available at the database level in other editions. For this or legacy reasons, the instance may be using SQL Server Trace for auditing, which remains an acceptable solution for the time being. Note, however, that Microsoft intends to remove most aspects of Trace at some point after SQL Server 2016.
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