STIGUI
V-248545CAT II — Medium severitySV-248545r1261679_rule

OL 8 must prevent system daemons from using Kerberos for authentication.

Rule version OL08-00-010161 · STIG v2 · 2026-08-24

Discussion

Unapproved mechanisms that are used for authentication to the cryptographic module are not verified and therefore cannot be relied on to provide confidentiality or integrity, and DoW data may be compromised.

OL 8 systems using encryption are required to use FIPS-compliant mechanisms for authenticating to cryptographic modules.

The key derivation function (KDF) in Kerberos is not FIPS compatible. Ensuring the system does not have any keytab files present prevents system daemons from using Kerberos for authentication. A keytab is a file containing pairs of Kerberos principals and encrypted keys.

FIPS 140-2 is the current standard for validating that mechanisms used to access cryptographic modules use authentication that meets DoW requirements. This allows for Security Levels 1, 2, 3, or 4 for use on a general-purpose computing system.

Check

Verify that OL 8 prevents system daemons from using Kerberos for authentication.

If the system is a server using krb5-server-1.17-18.el8.x86_64 or newer, this requirement is not applicable.

If the system is a workstation using krb5-workstation-1.17-18.el8.x86_64 or newer, this requirement is not applicable.

Check if there are available keytabs with the following command:

$ sudo ls -al /etc/*.keytab

If this command produces any file(s), this is a finding.

Fix

Configure OL 8 to prevent system daemons from using Kerberos for authentication.

Remove any files with the .keytab extension from the operating system.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-248545
Group title
SRG-OS-000120-GPOS-00061
Rule ID
SV-248545r1261679_rule
Check ID
C-51979r779199_chk
Fix ID
F-51933r779200_fix