Auditd Best Practices
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Auditd Best Practices provides a best-practice auditd configuration that collects broad, reusable security-relevant host telemetry across major Linux distributions.
Summary
Auditd Best Practices is an open-source configuration project that provides a best-practice ruleset for Linux's audit subsystem, covering process creation, syscall activity, privilege abuse, and other security-relevant host events. It ships as a set of auditd rule files you drop onto a host rather than as a running service, and it deliberately avoids baking in detection logic, leaving analysis to Sigma rules, SIEMSIEMSecurity information and event management, collecting logs from many systems and correlating events to find suspicious activity. Analysts use it to investigate alerts and incidents. content, or other host-side tooling. This makes it a fit for detection engineers and Linux administrators who need reliable telemetry rather than a packaged product with alerts built in. Its README points to Aurora Linux, a Sigma-based agent for Linux, as one downstream consumer of this data. First committed in 2018 and still active, with 36 contributors and four releases in the tracked window, the most recent one 122 days ago.
Auditd Best Practices provides a best-practice auditd configuration that collects broad, reusable security-relevant host telemetry across major Linux distributions.
How Auditd Best Practices helps
Which parts of Linux host activity would I have no record of if an attacker touched them?
the rule set covers process creation, syscalls, privilege abuse, kernel/module/mount/swap/time changes, sudo and login state, network and firewall configuration, SSH and systemd changes, and special primitives like ptrace, bpf, and namespaces, so anything outside those areas stays unrecorded
Will this ruleset actually load on the distribution I run?
it is written to load out-of-the-box on major Linux distributions and uses a validation flag so distro-specific paths that do not exist on a given host are skipped rather than causing the load to fail
Am I about to drown my logs in noise from process and network events?
it flags process creation, socket creation, and file-access-failure telemetry as intentionally high-volume so the reader knows which sections to tune before deploying rather than discovering it after
Who escalated privileges or abused sudo on this host?
the coverage includes account databases, PAM, sudo, login state, and privilege-abuse heuristics as distinct sections, so those events are captured as raw telemetry for a separate detection layer to interpret
Did someone modify audit configuration itself to cover their tracks?
self-auditing and audit configuration integrity are called out as a dedicated coverage area, so tampering with the rules or their files produces its own recorded events
Is my telemetry consistent enough to plug straight into Sigma rules or SIEM content without writing custom parsing?
the rules deliberately exclude hard-coded detection logic and instead standardize the raw event coverage, leaving matching to downstream tools like Aurora Linux that consume this same structured telemetry
Languages
Command line
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for Auditd Best Practices, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail Auditd Best Practices puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in Neo23x0/auditd, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 4 +2 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 2 +2 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 0% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 505 days issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 15 of 30 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 15
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 1,938
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
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