STIGUI
V-252942CAT II — Medium severitySV-252942r991589_rule

The TOSS SSH daemon must not allow authentication using known host's authentication.

Rule version TOSS-04-010400 · STIG v2 · 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 the SSH daemon does not allow authentication using known host's authentication with the following command:

$ sudo grep -i IgnoreUserKnownHosts /etc/ssh/sshd_config

IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes

If the value is returned as "no", the returned line is commented out, or no output is returned, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the SSH daemon to not allow authentication using known host's authentication.

Add the following line in "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" or uncomment the line and set the value to "yes":

IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes

The SSH daemon must be restarted for the changes to take effect. To restart the SSH daemon, run the following command:

$ sudo systemctl restart sshd.service

Identifiers

Group ID
V-252942
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-252942r991589_rule
Check ID
C-56395r824148_chk
Fix ID
F-56345r824149_fix