Audit Database Project

The main goal of this project is to build comprehensive audit logging for a federated identity management system, which records details of message information, enabling tracking and analysis of federation activities.

The Audit Database will store structured audit log data from one or more service providers in an ODBC database and will be used by tools for management reporting and message tracking. The exact semantics of the audit messages including how they are formed and when they are recorded are provided in the linked paper.

Architectural Model of the Federation Entities

The above figure shows the architectural components of user clients and service providers (SP's). The language and models block in the center of the diagram corresponds to the main components described in the original paper, that is, the assertion library, the policy grammar, and the relational database with its respective access control related components. As shown, the most important components for a SP are: a module for policy manager, a subsystem collecting and managing remote attributes and credentials, and an access control module to enforce access control and policies. The user client components are: a local policy manager, an attribute and credential management system, and the interface by which the client interacts with the federation.

Database Loading & Access

Audit information is loaded directly into the Audit Database, and so it is suitable for both real time applications such as tracking, and for historical analysis. The audit database is loaded from the SP audit log files.

The audit log daemon reads log files as they are written, and sends information to the Audit Database. It may also be used to analyze historical files. The audit log daemon will correctly handle log file rollover.

The exact instances for logging the activities are defined using the semantics of the assertions described in the paper. A more detailed diagram of the components is given below. Need to add more details of the flow of events for access/ modification etc.

Structure of the Audit Database

The audit database structure needs to be defined.

A diagram is needed which will show the scope and structure of the Audit database. We will see that the audit database includes:

• Message parameters, as described in the assert logs.
• Storage of records from one or more SP instances.