STIGUI
V-261340CAT II — Medium severitySV-261340r996483_rule

SLEM 5 SSH daemon must be configured to not allow authentication using known hosts authentication.

Rule version SLEM-05-255075 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-20

Discussion

Configuring this setting for the SSH daemon provides additional assurance that remote logon via SSH will require a password, even in the event of misconfiguration elsewhere.

Check

Verify SLEM 5 SSH daemon is configured to not allow authentication using "known hosts" 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*ignoreuserknownhosts'
     /etc/ssh/sshd_config:IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes

If "IgnoreUserKnownHosts" is not set to "no", is commented out, missing, or conflicting results are returned, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure SLEM 5 SSH daemon to not allow authentication using "known hosts" authentication.

Add or modify the following line in the "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" file:

IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes

Restart the SSH daemon in order for the changes to take effect:

     > sudo systemctl restart sshd.service

Identifiers

Group ID
V-261340
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-261340r996483_rule
Check ID
C-65069r996481_chk
Fix ID
F-64977r996482_fix