Inspektr Auditing

What is it?

Inspektr is a very small library designed to capture and record the following pieces of runtime information from Spring framework's managed beans i.e. running inside Spring DI container:

• The WHO: who performed an action being audited.
• The WHAT: what system resource being targeted by this audited action
• The ACTION: what audited action is being performed
• The APPLICATION_CODE: an arbitrary string token identifying application running an audited action
• The WHEN: a timestamp of an audited action
• The CLIENT_IP: an IP address of the client invoking an audited action
• The SERVER_IP: an IP address of the server running an audited action

Nothing more, nothing less... at the moment at least.

The architecture

The architecture of Inspektr Auditing library is very simple. At its core it has 3 main components:

• AuditActionContext: an immutable value object holding the auditing information mentioned above which has been gathered at audit points

• AuditTrailManager: a central Service Provider Interface that describes the recording of the audit data contract.

• AuditTrailManagementAspect: a POJO-style aspect responsible for capturing the auditing data at the configured audit points and passing it to the configured list of AuditTrailManagers for saving it

In addition to the main components, Inspektr defines the following pluggable strategy interfaces to resolve the WHO, WHAT, ACTION, CLIENT_IP and SERVER_IP audit data, namely:

• PrincipalResolver: resolves principals performing an audited action i.e. the WHO at audit points
• AuditResourceResolver: resolves the system resource being targeted by an audit action i.e. the WHAT at audit points
• AuditActionResolver: resolves audited actions i.e. ACTION at audit points
• ClientInfoResolver: resolves CLIENT_IP and SERVER_IP for audited actions at audit points
• Audit and Audits: runtime method annotations used to mark audit points. Note that at this time, the only audit points supported by Inspektr are around method executions i.e. defined by method AspectJ joinpoints marked with these annotations.

Out of the box, Inspektr comes with the following default implementations for all the pluggable components:

/**
 * Simple <code>AuditTrailManager</code> that dumps auditable information to output stream.
 * <p>
 * Useful for testing.
 */
 public final class ConsoleAuditTrailManager extends AbstractStringAuditTrailManager { .. }

---

/**
 * <code>AuditTrailManager</code> that dumps auditable information to a configured logger.
 * 
 */
 public final class Slf4jLoggingAuditTrailManager extends AbstractStringAuditTrailManager { .. }

---

 /**
 * Implementation of {@link com.github.inspektr.audit.AuditTrailManager} to persist the
 * audit trail to the  AUDIT_TRAIL table in RDBMS of choice
 * <p/>
 * <pre>
 * CREATE TABLE COM_AUDIT_TRAIL
 * (
 *  AUD_USER      VARCHAR2(100) NOT NULL,
 *  AUD_CLIENT_IP VARCHAR(15)   NOT NULL,
 *  AUD_SERVER_IP VARCHAR(15)   NOT NULL,
 *  AUD_RESOURCE  VARCHAR2(100) NOT NULL,
 *  AUD_ACTION    VARCHAR2(100) NOT NULL,
 *  APPLIC_CD     VARCHAR2(5)   NOT NULL,
 *  AUD_DATE      TIMESTAMP     NOT NULL
 * )
 * </pre>
 *
 */
 public final class JdbcAuditTrailManager extends SimpleJdbcDaoSupport implements AuditTrailManager, Cleanable { .. }

In addition to the above AuditTrailManager inplementations, the default resolvers are available in the com.github.inspektr.audit.spi.support package

Configuration

1. First enable AuditTrailManagementAspect via either Spring proxy-based AOP by including the following directive in the application context definition file: <aop:aspectj-autoproxy/> or via AspectJ compile-time weaving by using ajc compiler e.g by using AspectJ compiler Maven plugin if using Maven, etc.

2. Configure com.github.inspektr.common.web.ClientInfoThreadLocalFilter in web.xml (if deploying Servlet-based web application)

3. Configure AuditTrailManagers, all the resolvers and wire all of this into the AuditTrailManagementAspect in the Spring application context definition file. The following example configuration is taken from JA-SIG CAS

4. Define audit points which would expose auditing data to the Inspektr auditing facility by annotating methods of Spring-managed beans with Audit or Audits annotations:

    @Audit(action="SERVICE_TICKET",
           actionResolverName="GRANT_SERVICE_TICKET_RESOLVER",
           resourceResolverName="GRANT_SERVICE_TICKET_RESOURCE_RESOLVER")
    public String grantServiceTicket(..)
   

Samples

The fork of Spring MVC Showcase has been created as a test bed for various Inspektr's features and configurations