security information in production and operations: a study on audit trails in database systems

Special care should be taken to verify the integrity and to ensure that sensitive data is adequately protected. One of the key activities for data loss prevention is anaudit. And in order to be able to audit a system, it is important to have reliable records of its activities. Systems that store critical data, whether financial or productive, must have features such as audit log, also called audit trail, which records all activities on critical data. This allows to identify harmful actions that can be internal or external, intentionally or unintentionally caused. Therefore, this paper presents major studies in security audit trail (audit log), especially records of logs, and it presents what is available in terms of commercial tools and what they offer.