STIGUI
V-282712CAT II — Medium severitySV-282712r1201589_rule

The TOSS 5 SSH daemon must not allow known hosts authentication.

Rule version TOSS-05-000258 · STIG v1 · 2026-08-20

Discussion

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

Check

Verify the SSH daemon does not allow known hosts authentication using 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'

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 known hosts authentication.

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

IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes

Restart the SSH service for changes to take effect:

$ sudo systemctl restart sshd.service

Identifiers

Group ID
V-282712
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-282712r1201589_rule
Check ID
C-87273r1201114_chk
Fix ID
F-87178r1201588_fix