The Photon operating system must configure Secure Shell (SSH) to disallow HostbasedAuthentication.

SSH trust relationships enable trivial lateral spread after a host compromise and therefore must be explicitly disabled.

At the command line, run the following command to verify the running configuration of sshd:

# sshd -T|&grep -i HostbasedAuthentication

Example result:

hostbasedauthentication no

If "HostbasedAuthentication" is not set to "no", this is a finding.

Navigate to and open:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

Ensure the "HostbasedAuthentication" line is uncommented and set to the following:

HostbasedAuthentication no

At the command line, run the following command:

# systemctl restart sshd.service