STIGUI
V-256769CAT II — Medium severitySV-256769r961167_rule

The Security Token Service must not enable support for TRACE requests.

Rule version VCST-70-000025 · STIG v1 · 2026-09-09

Discussion

"TRACE" is a technique for a user to request internal information about Tomcat. This is useful during product development but should not be enabled in production. Allowing an attacker to conduct a TRACE operation against the Security Token Service will expose information that would be useful to perform a more targeted attack.

The Security Token Service provides the "allowTrace" parameter as means to disable responding to TRACE requests.

Check

At the command prompt, run the following command:

# grep allowTrace /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/conf/server.xml 

If "allowTrace" is set to "true", this is a finding.

If no line is returned, this is not a finding.

Fix

Navigate to and open:

/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/conf/server.xml

Locate and remove the 'allowTrace="true"' setting.

Restart the service with the following command:

# vmon-cli --restart sts

Identifiers

Group ID
V-256769
Group title
SRG-APP-000266-WSR-000160
Rule ID
SV-256769r961167_rule
Check ID
C-60444r889275_chk
Fix ID
F-60387r889276_fix