STIGUI
V-278403CAT II — Medium severitySV-278403r1259874_rule

NGINX must only allow using DoW-approved certificate authorities for PKI.

Rule version NGNX-APP-001900 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-24

Discussion

Untrusted Certificate Authorities (CA) can issue certificates, but they may be issued by organizations or individuals that seek to compromise DoW systems or by organizations with insufficient security controls. If the CA used for verifying the certificate is not a DoW-approved CA, trust of this CA has not been established.

The DoW will only accept PKI certificates obtained from a DoW-approved internal or external certificate authority. Reliance on CAs for the establishment of secure sessions includes, for example, using TLS certificates.

This requirement focuses on communications protection for the application session rather than for the network packet.

This requirement applies to applications that use communications sessions. This includes, but is not limited to, web-based applications and service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Satisfies: SRG-APP-000427, SRG-APP-000177, SRG-APP-000910

Check

Determine the path to NGINX config file(s):

# nginx -qT | grep "# configuration"
# configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

Note: The default NGINX configuration is "/etc/nginx/nginx.conf", though various files may also be included.

Find any "ssl_certificate" ssl_client_certificate" directives and verify they are DoW approved.

If the certificates are not DoW approved, this is a finding.

Fix

Replace any non-DoW issued certificates with DoW-issued certificates.

After replacing the certificates, reload NGINX:

# nginx -s reload

Identifiers

Group ID
V-278403
Group title
SRG-APP-000427
Rule ID
SV-278403r1259874_rule
Check ID
C-82937r1259872_chk
Fix ID
F-82842r1259873_fix