The Photon operating system must configure Secure Shell (SSH) to ignore user-specific known_host files.
Severity | Group ID | Group Title | Version | Rule ID | Date | STIG Version |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| medium | V-258881 | SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227 | PHTN-40-000218 | SV-258881r991589_rule | 2024-07-11 | 2 |
Description
SSH trust relationships enable trivial lateral spread after a host compromise and therefore must be explicitly disabled. Individual users can have a local list of trusted remote machines, which must also be ignored while disabling host-based authentication generally.
ℹ️ Check
At the command line, run the following command to verify the running configuration of sshd:
# sshd -T|&grep -i IgnoreUserKnownHosts
Expected result:
ignoreuserknownhosts yes
If "IgnoreUserKnownHosts" is not set to "yes", this is a finding.
✔️ Fix
Navigate to and open:
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
Ensure the "IgnoreUserKnownHosts" line is uncommented and set to the following:
IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes
At the command line, run the following command:
# systemctl restart sshd.service