[Aide] Permission denied when scanning readable directory below unreadable directory

[Keith Constable]

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I would like to use AIDE to help me verify the integrity of my home directory on
a shared Linux system. I am not an administrator of this system. I have built
and installed AIDE in my home directory and it seems to work properly.

The sysadmin has set permissions on /home to 0751. This allows users to enter
/home, but not list the contents of the directory (an ineffective security
measure, in my opinion).

For demonstration purposes, consider this overly simple aide.conf:

  database_out=file:aide.db.new
  /home/kccricket R

Given this setup, running aide -i will output:

  open_dir():Permission denied: /home

  AIDE, version 0.15.1

  ### AIDE database at aide.db.new initialized.

The resulting AIDE database will be empty. If I run the same command with -V255
(highest verbosity), I can see that AIDE examines every directory in / and then
attempts to do the same with /home. It chokes because it can't list the contents
of /home.

Is there a way to make this work, short of asking the sysadmin to change the
perms on /home?

Regards,

Keith Constable