Periodically audit file permissions for mistaken leaks

Question

I'm looking for a way to periodically check a file system tree for permissions that have been set incorrectly.

The context is:

this is in an academic compute environment, with students, researchers and overworked sysadmins
the focus is not on malicious actors, but rather mistakes made by any of the above
existing users/group hierarchy
prevention does not have to be immediate, we're thinking of something that can run daily
ideally don't want to have to install extra tools such as tripwire
don't need a forensic trail to be captured

My hunch is a script that:

Before I start this, is there an established way to do this that I'm not aware of?

You could simply override permissions via `chmod` in a cron script, this way wrong permissions will get changed only. Or an other approach to set permissions is to set a sticky-bit for the parent directory and this will have priority over the file-rights. — Mario, Dec 20 '21 at 14:34

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 20 '21 at 09:42

3

You want to check AIDE or mtree

answered Dec 20 '21 at 09:42

AlexD

1 Answers1