An audit trail or audit log is a chronological sequence of audit records, each of which contains evidence directly pertaining to and resulting from the execution of a business process or system function.

Audit records typically result from activities such as transactions or communications by individual people, systems, accounts or other entities. A financial transaction involves a change in the status of the finances of two or more businesses or individuals. ... Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. ...

Webopedia defines an audit trail as "a record showing who has accessed a computer system and what operations he or she has performed during a given period of time." ([1])

In telecommunication, the term means a record of both completed and attempted accesses and service, or data forming a logical path linking a sequence of events, used to trace the transactions that have affected the contents of a record. Copy of the original phone of Alexander Graham Bell at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris Telecommunication is the assisted transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose of communication. ... For other uses, see Data (disambiguation). ... For other senses of this word, see sequence (disambiguation). ...

In information or communications security, information audit means a chronological record of system activities to enable the reconstruction and examination of the sequence of events and/or changes in an event. Security is everyone’s responsibility. ... Communications security (COMSEC): Measures and controls taken to deny unauthorized persons information derived from telecommunications and ensure the authenticity of such telecommunications. ... An information audit trail or information audit log is a chronological sequence of audit records, each of which contains data about when and by whom was a particular record changed. ... For other uses, see System (disambiguation). ...

In nursing research, it refers to the act of maintaining a running log or journal of decisions relating to a research project, thus making clear the steps taken and changes made to the original protocol. Nursing research is the term used to describe the evidence used to support Nursing practice. ... This article is about the journal as a written medium. ... Look up Protocol in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

In accounting, it refers to documentation of detailed transactions supporting summary ledger entries. This documentation may be on paper or electronic records. It has been suggested that Accounting scholarship be merged into this article or section. ... In general terms, documentation is any communicable material (such as text, video, audio, etc. ... A ledger (from the English dialect forms liggen or leggen, to lie or lay; in sense adapted from the Dutch substantive logger), is the principal book for recording transactions. ...

The process that creates audit trail should always run in a privileged mode, so it could access and supervise all actions from all users, and normal user could not stop/change it. Furthermore, for the same reason, trail file or database table with a trail should not be accessible to normal users. In processors with memory protection, privileged mode (as opposed to user mode) is the mode in which the operating system kernel runs. ...

In what relates to audit trail, it is also very much important to take into consideration the liability issues of your audit trails, as many times in case of dispute, these audit trails can work as an evidence for some incident.

See also

• Paper trail
• Security log
• Sudosh

Electronic voting (a. ... A security log is used to track security-related information on a system. ... sudosh is a filter and can be used as a login shell. ...

Sources

• Federal Standard 1037C
• National Information Systems Security Glossary