STIGUI
V-258031CAT II — Medium severitySV-258031r1268251_rule

RHEL 9 must disable the ability of a user to accidentally press Ctrl-Alt-Del and cause a system to shut down or reboot.

Rule version RHEL-09-271105 · STIG v2 · 2026-09-17

Discussion

A locally logged-in user who presses Ctrl-Alt-Del, when at the console, can reboot the system. If accidentally pressed, as could happen in the case of mixed OS environment, this can create the risk of short-term loss of availability of systems due to unintentional reboot.

Check

Verify RHEL 9 is configured to ignore the Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence in the GNOME desktop with the following command:

Note: This requirement assumes the use of the RHEL 9 default graphical user interface, the GNOME desktop environment. If the system does not have any graphical user interface installed, this requirement is not applicable.

$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys logout 

['']

If the GNOME desktop is configured to shut down when Ctrl-Alt-Del is pressed, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure RHEL 9 to ignore the Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence in the GNOME desktop.

Run the following command to set the media-keys logout setting:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys logout "['']"

Run the following command to update the database:

$ sudo dconf update

Identifiers

Group ID
V-258031
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-258031r1268251_rule
Check ID
C-61772r1134919_chk
Fix ID
F-61696r1045113_fix