STIGUI
V-269421CAT II — Medium severitySV-269421r1261555_rule

AlmaLinux OS 9 must terminate idle user sessions.

Rule version ALMA-09-040500 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-25

Discussion

Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port that has been left unattended. In addition, quickly terminating an idle session will also free up resources committed by the managed network element.

Terminating network connections associated with communications sessions includes, for example, de-allocating associated TCP/IP address/port pairs at the operating system level, and de-allocating networking assignments at the application level if multiple application sessions are using a single operating system-level network connection. This does not mean that the operating system terminates all sessions or network access; it only ends the inactive session and releases the resources associated with that session.

Check

Note: For cloud hosted systems where "ClientAliveInterval" (V-269419) is configured, this setting is not applicable.

Verify that AlmaLinux OS 9 logs out sessions that are idle for 10 minutes with the following command:

$ systemd-analyze cat-config systemd/logind.conf | grep StopIdleSessionSec

#StopIdleSessionSec=infinity StopIdleSessionSec=600

If "StopIdleSessionSec" is not configured to "600" seconds, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure AlmaLinux OS 9 to log out idle sessions.

Create the directory if necessary:

$ mkdir -p /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/

Create a *.conf file in /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/ with the following content:

[Login] StopIdleSessionSec=600 KillUserProcesses=no

Restart systemd-logind:

$ systemctl restart systemd-logind

Identifiers

Group ID
V-269421
Group title
SRG-OS-000163-GPOS-00072
Rule ID
SV-269421r1261555_rule
Check ID
C-73452r1261554_chk
Fix ID
F-73353r1155258_fix