96 lines
5 KiB
Plaintext
96 lines
5 KiB
Plaintext
---
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layout: docs
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page_title: Audit Devices
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description: Audit devices are mountable devices that log requests and responses in Vault.
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---
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# Audit Devices
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Audit devices are the components in Vault that collectively keep a detailed log of all
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requests and response to Vault. Because every operation with Vault is an API
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request/response, when using a single audit device, the audit log contains _every authenticated_ interaction with
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Vault, including errors.
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Multiple audit devices can be enabled and Vault will attempt to send the audit logs to
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all of them. This allows you to not only have redundant copies, but also a way to check for data tampering in the logs themselves.
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~> Note: When using multiple audit devices, Vault considers a request to be successful if it can log to *at least* one configured audit device (see: [Blocked Audit Devices](/docs/audit#blocked-audit-devices) section below). Therefore in order to build a complete picture of all audited actions, use the aggregate/union of the logs from each audit device.
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## Format
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Each line in the audit log is a JSON object. The `type` field specifies what
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type of object it is. Currently, only two types exist: `request` and `response`.
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The line contains all of the information for any given request and response. By
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default, all the sensitive information is first hashed before logging in the
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audit logs.
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## Sensitive Information
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The audit logs contain the full request and response objects for every
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interaction with Vault. The request and response can be matched utilizing a
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unique identifier assigned to each request.
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Most strings contained within requests and responses are hashed with a salt using HMAC-SHA256. The purpose of the hash is so that secrets aren't in plaintext within your audit logs. However, you're still able to check the value of secrets by generating HMACs yourself; this can be done with the audit device's hash function and salt by using the `/sys/audit-hash` API endpoint (see the documentation for more details).
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~> Currently, only strings that come from JSON or returned in JSON are
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HMAC'd. Other data types, like integers, booleans, and so on, are passed
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through in plaintext. We recommend that all sensitive data be provided as string values
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inside all JSON sent to Vault (i.e., that integer values are provided in quotes).
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While most strings are hashed, Vault does make some exceptions, such as auth and secrets, and users can enable additional exceptions using the [secrets enable](/docs/commands/secrets/enable) command, and then tune it afterward.
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**see also**:
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[secrets tune](/docs/commands/secrets/tune)
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[auth enable](/docs/commands/auth/enable)
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[auth tune](/docs/commands/auth/tune)
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## Enabling/Disabling Audit Devices
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When a Vault server is first initialized, no auditing is enabled. Audit
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devices must be enabled by a root user using `vault audit enable`.
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When enabling an audit device, options can be passed to it to configure it.
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For example, the command below enables the file audit device:
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```shell-session
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$ vault audit enable file file_path=/var/log/vault_audit.log
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```
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In the command above, we passed the "file_path" parameter to specify the path
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where the audit log will be written to. Each audit device has its own
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set of parameters. See the documentation to the left for more details.
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~> Note: Audit device configuration is replicated to all nodes within a
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cluster by default, and to performance/DR secondaries for Vault Enterprise clusters.
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Before enabling an audit device, ensure that all nodes within the cluster(s)
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will be able to successfully log to the audit device to avoid Vault being
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blocked from serving requests.
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An audit device can be limited to only within the node's cluster with the [`local`](/api-docs/system/audit#local) parameter.
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When an audit device is disabled, it will stop receiving logs immediately.
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The existing logs that it did store are untouched.
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## Blocked Audit Devices
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Audit device logs are critically important and ignoring auditing failures opens an avenue for attack. Vault will not respond to requests when no enabled audit devices can record them.
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Vault can distinguish between two types of audit device failures.
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- A blocking failure is one where an attempt to write to the audit device never completes. This is unlikely with a local disk device, but could occure with a network-based audit device.
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- When multiple audit devices are enabled, if any of them fail in a non-blocking fashion, Vault requests can still complete successfully provided at least one audit device successfully writes the audit record. If any of the audit devices fail in a blocking fashion however, Vault requests will hang until the blocking is resolved.
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In other words, Vault will not complete any requests until the blocked audit device can write.
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## Tutorial
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Refer to [Blocked Audit Devices](https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials/vault/blocked-audit-devices) for a step-by-step tutorial.
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## API
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Audit devices also have a full HTTP API. Please see the [Audit device API
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docs](/api-docs/system/audit) for more details.
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