STIGUI
V-258898CAT II — Medium severitySV-258898r991589_rule

The Photon operating system must disable systemd fallback DNS.

Rule version PHTN-40-000236 · STIG v2 · 2026-08-26

Discussion

Systemd contains an ability to set fallback DNS servers, which is used for DNS lookups in the event no system level DNS servers are configured or other DNS servers are specified in the Systemd resolved.conf file. If uncommented, this configuration contains Google DNS servers by default and could result in DNS leaking info unknowingly in the event DNS is absent or misconfigured at the system level.

Check

At the command line, run the following command to verify systemd fallback DNS is disabled:

# resolvectl status | grep '^Fallback DNS'

If the output indicates that Fallback DNS servers are configured, this is a finding.

Fix

Navigate to and open:

/etc/systemd/resolved.conf

Add or update the "FallbackDNS" entry to the following:

FallbackDNS=

Restart the Systemd resolved service by running the following command:

# systemctl restart systemd-resolved

Note: If this option is not given, a compiled-in list of DNS servers is used instead, which is undesirable.

Identifiers

Group ID
V-258898
Group title
SRG-OS-000480-GPOS-00227
Rule ID
SV-258898r991589_rule
Check ID
C-62638r933753_chk
Fix ID
F-62547r935568_fix