STIGUI
V-215278CAT II — Medium severitySV-215278r991592_rule

All files and directories contained in users home directories on AIX must be group-owned by a group in which the home directory owner is a member.

Rule version AIX7-00-002087 · STIG v3 · 2026-08-31

Discussion

If the Group Identifier (GID) of the home directory is not the same as the GID of the user, this would allow unauthorized access to files.

Check

Check the contents of user home directories for files group-owned by a group of which the home directory's owner is not a member.

List the user accounts:

# cut -d : -f 1 /etc/passwd root daemon bin sys adm uucp nobody invscout snapp ipsec srvproxy esaadmin sshd doejohn dirtjoe

For each user account, get a list of group names for files in the user's home directory:

# find < users home directory > -exec ls -lLd {} \;

Obtain the list of group names associated with the user's account:

# lsuser -a groups < user name > doejohn groups=staff

Check the group name lists:

# cat /etc/group system:!:0:root,srvproxy,esaadmin staff:!:1:ipsec,srvproxy,esaadmin,sshd,doejohn bin:!:2:root,bin sys:!:3:root,bin,sys adm:!:4:bin,adm mail:!:6: security:!:7:root cron:!:8:root audit:!:10:root ecs:!:28: nobody:!:4294967294:nobody,lpd usr:!:100:dirtjoe perf:!:20: shutdown:!:21: invscout:!:12:invscout snapp:!:13:snapp ipsec:!:200: sshd:!:201:sshd

If there are group names in the file list not present in the user list, this is a finding.

Fix

Change the group of a file not group-owned by a group where the home directory's owner is a member using command: # chgrp [user's primary group] [file with bad group ownership]

Identifiers

Group ID
V-215278
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00230
Rule ID
SV-215278r991592_rule
Check ID
C-16476r294285_chk
Fix ID
F-16474r294286_fix