STIGUI
V-215318CAT II — Medium severitySV-215318r958402_rule

AIX must automatically lock after 15 minutes of inactivity in the CDE Graphical desktop environment.

Rule version AIX7-00-003000 · STIG v3 · 2026-08-31

Discussion

A session time-out lock is a temporary action taken when a user stops work and moves away from the immediate physical vicinity of the information system but does not log out because of the temporary nature of the absence. Rather than relying on the user to manually lock their operating system session prior to vacating the vicinity, operating systems need to be able to identify when a user's session has idled and take action to initiate the session lock.

The session lock is implemented at the point where session activity can be determined and/or controlled.

Check

If CDE (X11) is not used on AIX, this is Not Applicable.

From the command prompt, run the following script: for file in /usr/dt/config/*/sys.resources; do etc_file=`echo $file | sed -e s/usr/etc/` echo "\nChecking config file "$etc_file"..." if [[ ! -f $etc_file ]]; then echo "Missing config file "$etc_file else cat $etc_file |grep 'dtsession\*saverTimeout:' cat $etc_file |grep 'dtsession\*lockTimeout:' fi done

The above script should yield the following output: Checking config file /etc/dt/config/C/sys.resources... Missing config file /etc/dt/config/C/sys.resources

Checking config file /etc/dt/config/POSIX/sys.resources... dtsession*saverTimeout: 15 dtsession*lockTimeout: 30

Checking config file /etc/dt/config/en_US/sys.resources... dtsession*saverTimeout: 15 dtsession*lockTimeout: 25

If the result of the script shows any config file missing, or any of the "dtsession*saverTimeout" or "dtsession*lockTimeout" values are greater than "15", this is a finding.

Fix

From the command prompt, run the following script to set the default timeout parameters "dtsession*saverTimeout:" and "dtsession*lockTimeout:" as "15" minutes: for file in /usr/dt/config/*/sys.resources; do etc_file=`echo $file | sed -e s/usr/etc/` echo "\nupdating config file "$etc_file"..." if [[ ! -f $etc_file ]]; then dir=`dirname $file | sed -e s/usr/etc/` mkdir -p $dir echo 'dtsession*saverTimeout: 15' >> $dir/sys.resources echo 'dtsession*lockTimeout: 15' >> $dir/sys.resources else cp $etc_file $etc_file.bak cat $etc_file | grep -v 'dtsession\*saverTimeout:' > $etc_file.sav cat $etc_file.sav | grep -v 'dtsession\*lockTimeout:' > $etc_file echo 'dtsession*saverTimeout: 15' >> $etc_file echo 'dtsession*lockTimeout: 15' >> $etc_file fi done

Identifiers

Group ID
V-215318
Group title
SRG-OS-000029-GPOS-00010
Rule ID
SV-215318r958402_rule
Check ID
C-16516r294405_chk
Fix ID
F-16514r294406_fix