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Guide to the Secure Configuration of Debian 11

Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark

  • Ensure SMAP is not disabled during boot

    The SMAP is used to prevent the supervisor mode from unintentionally reading/writing into memory pages in the user space, it is enabled by default ...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Ensure SMEP is not disabled during boot

    The SMEP is used to prevent the supervisor mode from executing user space code, it is enabled by default since Linux kernel 3.0. But it could be di...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Configure the confidence in TPM for entropy

    The TPM security chip that is available in most modern systems has a hardware RNG. It is also used to feed the entropy pool, but generally not cred...
    Rule Low Severity
  • Disable merging of slabs with similar size

    The kernel may merge similar slabs together to reduce overhead and increase cache hotness of objects. Disabling merging of slabs keeps the slabs se...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Configure Speculative Store Bypass Mitigation

    Certain CPUs are vulnerable to an exploit against a common wide industry wide performance optimization known as Speculative Store Bypass (SSB). In...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Enforce Spectre v2 mitigation

    Spectre V2 is an indirect branch poisoning attack that can lead to data leakage. An exploit for Spectre V2 tricks the indirect branch predictor int...
    Rule High Severity
  • Ensure debug-shell service is not enabled during boot

    systemd's <code>debug-shell</code> service is intended to diagnose systemd related boot issues with various <code>systemctl</code> commands. Once e...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Non-UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration

    Non-UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration
    Group
  • UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration

    UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration
    Group
  • zIPL bootloader configuration

    During the boot process, the bootloader is responsible for starting the execution of the kernel and passing options to it. The default Debian 11 bo...
    Group
  • Protect Random-Number Entropy Pool

    The I/O operations of the Linux kernel block layer due to their inherently unpredictable execution times have been traditionally considered as a re...
    Group
  • Ensure Solid State Drives Do Not Contribute To Random-Number Entropy Pool

    For each solid-state drive on the system, run:
     # echo 0 > /sys/block/DRIVE/queue/add_random
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Kernel Configuration

    Contains rules that check the kernel configuration that was used to build it.
    Group
  • Hash function for kernel module signing

    The hash function to use when signing modules during kernel build process.
    Value
  • Key and certificate for kernel module signing

    The private key and certificate to use when signing modules during kernel build process. On systems where the OpenSSL ENGINE_pkcs11 is functional —...
    Value
  • Kernel panic timeout

    The time, in seconds, to wait until a reboot occurs. If the value is <code>0</code> the system never reboots. If the value is less than <code>0</co...
    Value
  • Do not allow ACPI methods to be inserted/replaced at run time

    This debug facility allows ACPI AML methods to be inserted and/or replaced without rebooting the system. This configuration is available from kerne...
    Rule Low Severity
  • Disable kernel support for MISC binaries

    Enabling <code>CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC</code> makes it possible to plug wrapper-driven binary formats into the kernel. This is specially useful for prog...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Enable support for BUG()

    Disabling this option eliminates support for BUG and WARN, reducing the size of your kernel image and potentially quietly ignoring numerous fatal c...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Disable compatibility with brk()

    Enabling compatiliby with <code>brk()</code> allows legacy binaries to run (i.e. those linked against libc5). But this compatibility comes at the c...
    Rule Medium Severity

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