STIGUI
V-281167CAT II — Medium severitySV-281167r1268226_rule

RHEL 10 must require a unique superusers name upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes.

Rule version RHEL-10-600010 · STIG v1 · 2026-09-17

Discussion

Having a nondefault grub superuser username makes password-guessing attacks less effective.

Check

Verify RHEL 10 requires a unique superusers name upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes.

Verify that the boot loader superuser account has been set with the following command:

$ sudo grep -A1 "superusers" /etc/grub2.cfg set superusers="<accountname>" export superusers password_pbkdf2 <accountname> ${GRUB2_PASSWORD}

Verify <accountname> is not a common name such as root, admin, or administrator.

If superusers contains easily guessable usernames, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure RHEL 10 to have a unique username for the grub superuser account.

Edit the "/etc/grub.d/01_users" file and add or modify the following lines with a nondefault username for the superuser account:

set superusers="<accountname>" export superusers

Once the superuser account has been added, update the "grub.cfg" file by regenerating the GRUB configuration with the following command:

$ sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg --update-bls-cmdline

Reboot the system:

$ sudo reboot

Identifiers

Group ID
V-281167
Group title
SRG-OS-000080-GPOS-00048
Rule ID
SV-281167r1268226_rule
Check ID
C-85728r1166451_chk
Fix ID
F-85633r1166452_fix