STIGUI
V-271711CAT II — Medium severitySV-271711r1091845_rule

OL 9 SSH daemon must not allow rhosts authentication.

Rule version OL09-00-002348 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-21

Discussion

SSH trust relationships mean a compromise on one host can allow an attacker to move trivially to other hosts.

Check

Verify that OL 9 SSH daemon does not allow rhosts authentication with the following command:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/sshd -dd 2>&1 | awk '/filename/ {print $4}' | tr -d '\r' | tr '\n' ' ' | xargs sudo grep -iH '^\s*ignorerhosts' IgnoreRhosts yes

If the value is returned as "no", the returned line is commented out, or no output is returned, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the SSH daemon to not allow rhosts authentication.

Add the following line to "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" or to a file in "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d" or uncomment the line and set the value to "yes":

IgnoreRhosts yes

The SSH service must be restarted for changes to take effect:

$ sudo systemctl restart sshd.service

Identifiers

Group ID
V-271711
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-271711r1091845_rule
Check ID
C-75761r1091843_chk
Fix ID
F-75668r1091844_fix