How to detect which process has used a file now or in the past

This is a hypothetical question, not a problem I currently have. How do you detect which process has used a file now *or in the past*? To find out which process is accessing filename right now, lsof filename or fuser filename will do the work. But what if one wanted to know which processes accessed filename *in the last 24 hours*? One could get away with this ugly (*) hack while true; do fuser filename; sleep 1; done and let it run for 24 hours in another term. But is there actually a better system, without setting up a whole audit framework?

(*) not to mention that fuser could fail to detect the access if it took less than 1 sec...