A Stepwise Approach Towards an Interoperable and Flexible Logging Principle for Audit Trails

Although event recording on a computer system (also known as logging) is of utmost importance for reconstructing and detecting security relevant events, currently no adequate and sophisticated solution for complex environments, such as Grid and Cloud Computing, exist. Current LOG file formats lack of several important factors, hindering automatic evaluation needed for distributed systems to comply with laws and regulations or hindering detection of security breaches. In this paper we present a new concept utilizing XML technology to solve mentioned problems of current LOG file formats and describe the benefits of this new idea resulting in a flexible, interoperable LOG environment enabling automatic evaluation even in locally dispersed computing systems. As a result reliable, robust and consistent LOG files are produced allowing for automatic evaluation.