Enabling shared audit data

Abstract

Audit is recognised as an important aspect of good security and business practice however, current solutions are not supportive of electronic data and processes. This paper describes an audit service that both acts as a central place for logging from heterogeneous IT systems and a place to search and check the audit data. Notarisation structures are proposed that demonstrate the integrity of the audit records and allow users to check the validity and integrity of subsets of the overall audit chain. The audit system is based upon secure hardware allowing audit systems to be tightly integrated into the overall IT infrastructure whilst remaining in an alternative virtual trust domain. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.