STIGUI
V-271742CAT II — Medium severitySV-271742r1091938_rule

OL 9 debug-shell systemd service must be disabled.

Rule version OL09-00-002403 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-21

Discussion

The debug-shell requires no authentication and provides root privileges to anyone who has physical access to the machine. While this feature is disabled by default, masking it adds an additional layer of assurance that it will not be enabled via a dependency in systemd. This also prevents attackers with physical access from trivially bypassing security on the machine through valid troubleshooting configurations and gaining root access when the system is rebooted.

Check

Verify that OL 9 is configured to mask the debug-shell systemd service with the following command:

$ systemctl status debug-shell.service debug-shell.service Loaded: masked (Reason: Unit debug-shell.service is masked.) Active: inactive (dead)

If the "debug-shell.service" is loaded and not masked, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure OL 9 to mask the debug-shell systemd service with the following command:

$ sudo systemctl disable --now debug-shell.service
$ sudo systemctl mask --now debug-shell.service

Identifiers

Group ID
V-271742
Group title
SRG-OS-000324-GPOS-00125
Rule ID
SV-271742r1091938_rule
Check ID
C-75792r1091936_chk
Fix ID
F-75699r1091937_fix