Vulnerability Discussion

If auditing is enabled late in the startup process, the actions of some startup processes may not be audited. Some audit systems also maintain state information only available if auditing is enabled before a given process is created.

Check

Verify that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS enables auditing at system startup in grub with the following command

$ sudo grep "^\s*linux" /boot/grub/grub.cfg
linux /vmlinuz-6.8.0-31-generic root=UUID=c92a542f-aee4-4af9-94b2-203624ccb8e3 ro audit=1 quiet splash $vt_handoff
linux /vmlinuz-6.8.0-31-generic root=UUID=c92a542f-aee4-4af9-94b2-203624ccb8e3 ro recovery nomodeset dis_ucode_ldr audit=1

If any linux lines do not contain "audit=1", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to produce audit records at system startup.

Edit the "/etc/default/grub" file and add "audit=1" to the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX" option so that the line looks like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="audit=1"

To update the grub config file, run:

$ sudo update-grub