STIGUI
V-216310CAT II — Medium severitySV-216310r959010_rule

The .Xauthority files must not have extended ACLs.

Rule version SOL-11.1-020520 · STIG v3 · 2026-08-19

Discussion

.Xauthority files ensure the user is authorized to access the specific X Windows host. Extended ACLs may permit unauthorized modification of these files, which could lead to Denial of Service to authorized access or allow unauthorized access to be obtained.

Check

If X Display Manager (XDM) is not used on the system, this is not applicable.

Determine if XDM is running.

Procedure: # ps -ef | grep xdm

Check the file permissions for the .Xauthority files. # ls -lL .Xauthority

If the permissions include a "+", the file has an extended ACL and this is a finding.

Fix

Remove the extended ACL from the file.

# chmod A- .Xauthority

Identifiers

Group ID
V-216310
Group title
SRG-OS-000480
Rule ID
SV-216310r959010_rule
Check ID
C-17546r371018_chk
Fix ID
F-17544r371019_fix