STIGUI
V-258891CAT II — Medium severitySV-258891r991589_rule

The Photon operating system must log IPv4 packets with impossible addresses.

Rule version PHTN-40-000228 · STIG v2 · 2026-08-26

Discussion

The presence of "martian" packets (which have impossible addresses) as well as spoofed packets, source-routed packets, and redirects could be a sign of nefarious network activity. Logging these packets enables this activity to be detected.

Check

At the command line, run the following command to verify martian packets are logged:

# /sbin/sysctl -a --pattern "net.ipv4.conf.(all|default).log_martians"

Expected result:

net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1 net.ipv4.conf.default.log_martians = 1

If the "log_martians" kernel parameters are not set to "1", this is a finding.

Fix

Navigate to and open:

/etc/sysctl.d/zz-stig-hardening.conf

Add or update the following lines:

net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1 net.ipv4.conf.default.log_martians = 1

At the command line, run the following command to load the new configuration:

# /sbin/sysctl --load /etc/sysctl.d/zz-stig-hardening.conf

Note: If the file zz-stig-hardening.conf does not exist, it must be created.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-258891
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-258891r991589_rule
Check ID
C-62631r933732_chk
Fix ID
F-62540r933733_fix