Enabling shared audit data

Audit is an important aspect of good security and business practice; however, current solutions are not supportive of electronic data and processes. This paper describes an audit service that both acts as a central place for logging from heterogeneous IT systems and a place to search and check the audit data. Notarisation structures enabling a user to check the integrity of audit records and subsets of the audit chain relating to their transactions have been developed. The audit system uses a secure hardware device to create an alternative trust domain in which to run processes, maintaining the integrity of the audit trail whilst allowing it to be tightly integration and co-located with the overall IT infrastructure. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]