Logging AWS Security Hub API calls with AWS CloudTrail

AWS Security Hub is integrated with AWS CloudTrail, a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an AWS service in Security Hub. CloudTrail captures API calls for Security Hub as events. The captured calls include calls from the Security Hub console and code calls to the Security Hub API operations. If you create a trail, you can enable continuous delivery of CloudTrail events to an Amazon S3 bucket, including events for Security Hub. If you don't configure a trail, you can still view the most recent events on the CloudTrail console in Event history. Using the information that CloudTrail collects, you can determine the request that was made to Security Hub, the IP address that the request was made from, who made the request, when it was made, and additional details.

To learn more about CloudTrail, including how to configure and enable it, see the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

Security Hub information in CloudTrail

CloudTrail is enabled on your AWS account when you create the account. When supported event activity occurs in Security Hub, that activity is recorded in a CloudTrail event along with other AWS service events in Event history. You can view, search, and download recent events in your account. For more information, see Viewing events with CloudTrail event history.

For an ongoing record of events in your account, including events for Security Hub, create a trail. A trail enables CloudTrail to deliver log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. By default, when you create a trail on the console, the trail applies to all AWS Regions. The trail logs events from all Regions in the AWS partition and delivers the log files to the Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. Additionally, you can configure other AWS services to further analyze and act upon the event data collected in CloudTrail logs. For more information, see the following:

Security Hub supports logging all of the Security Hub API actions as events in CloudTrail logs. To view a list of Security Hub operations, see the Security Hub API Reference.

When activity for the following actions is logged to CloudTrail, the value for responseElements is set to null. This ensures that sensitive information isn't included in CloudTrail logs.

Every event or log entry contains information about who generated the request. The identity information helps you determine the following:

For more information, see the CloudTrail userIdentity element.

Example: Security Hub log file entries

A trail is a configuration that enables delivery of events as log files to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. CloudTrail log files contain one or more log entries. An event represents a single request from any source and includes information about the requested action, the date and time of the action, request parameters, and so on. CloudTrail log files aren't an ordered stack trace of the public API calls, so they don't appear in any specific order.

The following example shows a CloudTrail log entry that demonstrates the CreateInsight action. In this example, an insight called Test Insight is created. The ResourceId attribute is specified as the Group by aggregator, and no optional filters for this insight are specified. For more information about insights, see Insights in AWS Security Hub.

{
    "eventVersion": "1.05",
    "userIdentity": {
        "type": "IAMUser",
        "principalId": "AIDAJK6U5DS22IAVUI7BW",
        "arn": "arn:aws:iam::012345678901:user/TestUser",
        "accountId": "012345678901",
        "accessKeyId": "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE",
        "userName": "TestUser"
    },
    "eventTime": "2018-11-25T01:02:18Z",
    "eventSource": "securityhub.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "CreateInsight",
    "awsRegion": "us-west-2",
    "sourceIPAddress": "205.251.233.179",
    "userAgent": "aws-cli/1.11.76 Python/2.7.10 Darwin/17.7.0 botocore/1.5.39",
    "requestParameters": {
        "Filters": {},
        "ResultField": "ResourceId",
        "Name": "Test Insight"
    },
    "responseElements": {
        "InsightArn": "arn:aws:securityhub:us-west-2:0123456789010:insight/custom/f4c4890b-ac6b-4c26-95f9-e62cc46f3055"
    },
    "requestID": "c0fffccd-f04d-11e8-93fc-ddcd14710066",
    "eventID": "3dabcebf-35b0-443f-a1a2-26e186ce23bf",
    "readOnly": false,
    "eventType": "AwsApiCall",
    "recipientAccountId": "012345678901"
}