STIGUI
V-270709CAT II — Medium severitySV-270709r1268251_rule

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS SSH daemon must prevent remote hosts from connecting to the proxy display.

Rule version UBTU-24-300023 · STIG v1 · 2026-09-09

Discussion

When X11 forwarding is enabled, there may be additional exposure to the server and client displays if the sshd proxy display is configured to listen on the wildcard address. By default, sshd binds the forwarding server to the loopback address and sets the hostname part of the DISPLAY environment variable to localhost. This prevents remote hosts from connecting to the proxy display.

Check

Verify the SSH daemon prevents remote hosts from connecting to the proxy display with the following command:

$ sudo grep -ir x11uselocalhost /etc/ssh/sshd_config* X11UseLocalhost yes

If the "X11UseLocalhost" keyword is set to "no", is commented out, is missing, or multiple conflicting results are returned, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the SSH daemon to prevent remote hosts from connecting to the proxy display.

Edit the "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" file to uncomment or add the line for the "X11UseLocalhost" keyword and set its value to "yes" (this file may be named differently or be in a different location if using a version of SSH that is provided by a third-party vendor):

X11UseLocalhost yes

Restart SSH for the changes to take effect:

$ sudo systemctl restart ssh

Identifiers

Group ID
V-270709
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-270709r1268251_rule
Check ID
C-74742r1066614_chk
Fix ID
F-74643r1208294_fix