The Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide Prev Chapter 10. The Tripwire policy file is a text file containing comments, rules, directives, and variables. This file dictates the way Tripwire checks your system. Each rule in the policy file specifies a system object to be monitored.
Rules also describe which changes to the object to report and which to ignore.
System objects are the files and directories you wish to monitor. Each object is identified by an object name. A property refers to a single characteristic of an object that Tripwire software can monitor. Directives control conditional processing of sets of rules in a policy file. The database file is a baseline snapshot of the system in a known secure state.