sally-js

sally

Secure audit logging records the user’s actions on content and enables detection of some forms of tampering with the logs. Sally provides strong cryptographic assurances that data stored before a system compromise cannot be modified after the compromise without detection.

Getting started

Install with npm

> npm install sally-js

with express

var express = require('express');
var sally = require('sally-js');
 
var app = express();
app.use(sally.express({ secret: 'a not secure secret' }));

Produces an audit trail of each request that modifies a resource or returns an error status code (4xx or 5xx).

{ audit: 
   { who: 'anonymous',
     when: '2015-11-12T05:38:22.159Z',
     where: 
      { client: '::ffff:127.0.0.1',
        host: '127.0.0.1:33578',
        server: 'richardschneider-sally-2123745' },
     why: 'POST',
     what: '/something/2',
     status: 201 },
  digest: 'DVSJZKM0xASOu76y3X/VNjZ4FuTb/P3OXW9MiS5vV/w=' }
  
{ audit: 
   { who: 'anonymous',
     when: '2015-11-07T11:00:06.005Z',
     where: { server: 'RoadWarrior' },
     why: 'GET',
     what: '/something/unknown',
     status: 404 },
  digest: 'xUTQHAbg8W+mZkRy4zsUs8bVw2NK/e0JZd/vNbkujRg=' }

sally.express() takes th following options object

property	description
methods	An array of HTTP method that will trigger an audit. Any status above 399 will also trigger an audit. The default is ['POST', 'PUT', 'DELETE', 'PATCH'].
user	a function(req) that should return the user name or ID or both. Defaults to req => 'anonymous'.
hostname	The name of the server. Defaults to os.hostname().
prefix	A prefix for each audit log file. Defaults to 'express-'.

with javascript

var sally = require('sally');
new sally.AuditTrail({ secret: 'a not secure secret' });
 
sally.log('hello world');
sally.log({ user: 'x', operation: 'login'})

with command line

sally --help

  Usage: sally-cli <cmd>

  Commands:

    verify <file>  verify the audit trail file, glob wildcards allowed
    list <file>    petty print the audit trail file

  Secure audit log manager

  Options:

    -h, --help           output usage information
    -V, --version        output the version number
    -s, --secret [text]  the secret for the audit trail, defaults to the environment variable "sallySecret"
    -v, --verbose        verbose

Secret

Sally uses the secret to generate the HMAC digest which provides the strong cryptographic assurances. It can be set with sally.configure({ secret: ...}) or with sally.express({ ... }). However, this means that the secret is in your code and possible also in the repo.

To avoid the above issue, Sally will use the value of the environment variable SallySecret, if present, as the secret value.