AIDE with Centos 5

In recent days, the subject of intrusion detection systems for centos has come up. To cover this and hopefully help some folks out, I’ve decided to do a brief writeup of Aide, the IDS which comes with CentOS. Please don’t confuse this with SELinux. SELinux is a Mandatory Access Control style permissioning system. SELinux stops people from getting into your system via protected applications. Aide lets you know if they actually get beyond SELinux and onto your system.

Installing Aide
yum install aide
What? You expected it to be harder? Now that we have aide installed, we need to configure it. The default config file should be okay for most folks who haven’t relocated things on the distro too much. Double check to make sure that all the directories you want to scan are listed. If you want to fine-tune the aide config, then you’ll need to edit /etc/aide.conf.

Initializing Aide’s Records

The next thing we need to do is create the initial aide database. For this, you need to run the following command:
# /usr/sbin/aide --init

This will take a little bit of time to run, and you’ll have some disk churn for minute or two while aide investigates your system and creates a baseline. Once this is done, we’re going to run an initial query of the system, just to make sure that everything’s working properly. To do this, run the command below:
# cp /var/lib/aide/aide.db.new.gz /var/lib/aide/aide.db.gz
# /usr/sbin/aide --check

This copies the initial database to the current database, then checks them against each other. In theory you should not have any differences. If you do, investigate them. As we’re still setting this up, they’re likely to be mundane .viminfo files or something similar. Keep in mind that when you update applications via ‘yum update’ that you may see aide go a bit nuts, just as tripwire or others would. You’re replacing files on your system when you update, and this is exactly what aide is designed to warn you about. In a perfect world, you should get some output like the text below:

# aide --check
AIDE, version 0.13.1
### All files match AIDE database.

Once we’re satisfied that aide is working as we expect, it’s time to set up a periodic check of the system. Only you can determine what’s often enough for your servers. I personally run aide as weekly cron, by creating a file in /etc/cron.weekly/ called aide.cron, with the following contents:


#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/aide --check | /bin/mail -s "Weekly Aide Data" email@host.com

This runs my check once a week. That’s pretty much it to setting up aide. If you want to see more options for aide, please check out the documentation in /usr/share/doc/aide-*/
Update:

So it seems that by default, aide requires selinux to be enabled, or at least permissive so that it can record the selinux contexts of the files it watches. If for some reason you really, truly want to have selinux disabled, but you still want aide to watch the system, use the config file below. It is identical to the default scan, but with the selinux bits removed.