Skip to content
ATO Pathways
Log In
Overview
Search
Catalogs
SCAP
OSCAL
Catalogs
Profiles
Resources
Documents
Publishers
References
Knowledge Base
Platform Documentation
Compliance Dictionary
Platform Changelog
About
Catalogs
XCCDF
VMware NSX 4.x Distributed Firewall Security Technical Implementation Guide
VMware NSX 4.x Distributed Firewall Security Technical Implementation Guide
An XCCDF Benchmark
Details
Profiles
Items
Prose
File Metadata
6 rules organized in 6 groups
SRG-NET-000074-FW-000009
1 Rule
The NSX Distributed Firewall must generate traffic log entries that can be sent by the ESXi hosts to the central syslog.
Low Severity
Without establishing what type of event occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. Audit event content that may be necessary to satisfy this requirement includes, for example, time stamps, source and destination addresses, user/process identifiers, event descriptions, success/fail indications, filenames involved, and access control or flow control rules invoked. Associating event types with detected events in the network element logs provides a means of investigating an attack, recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or identifying an improperly configured network element. Satisfies: SRG-NET-000074-FW-000009, SRG-NET-000075-FW-000010, SRG-NET-000076-FW-000011, SRG-NET-000077-FW-000012, SRG-NET-000078-FW-000013, SRG-NET-000492-FW-000006, SRG-NET-000493-FW-000007
SRG-NET-000193-FW-000030
1 Rule
The NSX Distributed Firewall must limit the effects of packet flooding types of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
Medium Severity
A firewall experiencing a DoS attack will not be able to handle production traffic load. The high utilization and CPU caused by a DoS attack will also have an effect on control keep-alives and timers used for neighbor peering resulting in route flapping and will eventually black hole production traffic. The device must be configured to contain and limit a DoS attack's effect on the device's resource utilization. The use of redundant components and load balancing are examples of mitigating "flood-type" DoS attacks through increased capacity. Satisfies: SRG-NET-000193-FW-000030, SRG-NET-000192-FW-000029, SRG-NET-000362-FW-000028
SRG-NET-000202-FW-000039
1 Rule
The NSX Distributed Firewall must deny network communications traffic by default and allow network communications traffic by exception.
Medium Severity
To prevent malicious or accidental leakage of traffic, organizations must implement a deny-by-default security posture at the network perimeter. Such rulesets prevent many malicious exploits or accidental leakage by restricting the traffic to only known sources and only those ports, protocols, or services that are permitted and operationally necessary. As a managed boundary interface, the firewall must block all inbound and outbound network traffic unless a filter is installed to explicitly allow it. The allow filters must comply with the Ports, Protocols, and Services Management (PPSM) Category Assurance List (CAL) and Vulnerability Assessment (VA). Satisfies: SRG-NET-000202-FW-000039, SRG-NET-000235-FW-000133
SRG-NET-000364-FW-000040
1 Rule
The NSX Distributed Firewall must be configured to inspect traffic at the application layer.
Medium Severity
Application inspection enables the firewall to control traffic based on different parameters that exist within the packets such as enforcing application-specific message and field length. Inspection provides improved protection against application-based attacks by restricting the types of commands allowed for the applications. Application inspection all enforces conformance against published RFCs. Some applications embed an IP address in the packet that needs to match the source address that is normally translated when it goes through the firewall. By enabling application inspection for a service that embeds IP addresses, the firewall translates embedded addresses and updates any checksum or other fields that are affected by the translation. By enabling application inspection for a service that uses dynamically assigned ports, the firewall monitors sessions to identify the dynamic port assignments, and permits data exchange on these ports for the duration of the specific session.
SRG-NET-000364-FW-000042
1 Rule
The NSX Distributed Firewall must configure SpoofGuard to restrict it from accepting outbound packets that contain an illegitimate address in the source address.
Medium Severity
A compromised host in an enclave can be used by a malicious platform to launch cyberattacks on third parties. This is a common practice in "botnets", which are a collection of compromised computers using malware to attack other computers or networks. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks frequently leverage IP source address spoofing to send packets to multiple hosts that in turn will then send return traffic to the hosts with the IP addresses that were forged. This can generate significant amounts of traffic. Therefore, protection measures to counteract IP source address spoofing must be taken. SpoofGuard is a tool that is designed to prevent virtual machines from sending traffic with an IP address from which it is not authorized to send traffic. In the instance that a virtual machine's IP address does not match the IP address on the corresponding logical port and segment address binding in SpoofGuard, the virtual machine's virtual network interface card (vNIC) is prevented from accessing the network entirely. SpoofGuard can be configured at the port or segment level. There are several reasons SpoofGuard might be used, but for the distributed firewall it will guarantee that rules will not be inadvertently (or deliberately) bypassed. For distributed firewall (DFW) rules created using IP sets as sources or destinations, the possibility always exists that a virtual machine could have its IP address forged in the packet header, thereby bypassing the rules in question.
SRG-NET-000364-FW-000042
1 Rule
The NSX Distributed Firewall must configure an IP Discovery profile to disable trust on every use method.
High Severity
A compromised host in an enclave can be used by a malicious platform to launch cyberattacks on third parties. This is a common practice in "botnets", which are a collection of compromised computers using malware to attack other computers or networks. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks frequently leverage IP source address spoofing to send packets to multiple hosts that in turn will then send return traffic to the hosts with the IP addresses that were forged. This can generate significant amounts of traffic. Therefore, protection measures to counteract IP source address spoofing must be taken. IP Discovery in NSX uses DHCP and DHCPv6 snooping, Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) snooping, Neighbor Discovery (ND) snooping, and VM Tools to learn MAC and IP addresses. The discovered MAC and IP addresses are used to achieve ARP/ND suppression, which minimizes traffic between VMs connected to the same logical switch. The addresses are also used by the SpoofGuard and distributed firewall (DFW) components. DFW uses the address bindings to determine the IP address of objects in firewall rules. By default, the discovery methods ARP snooping and ND snooping operate in a mode called trust on first use (TOFU). In TOFU mode, when an address is discovered and added to the realized bindings list, that binding remains in the realized list forever. TOFU applies to the first "n" unique <IP, MAC, VLAN> bindings discovered using ARP/ND snooping, where "n" is the configurable binding limit. Users can disable TOFU for ARP/ND snooping. The methods will then operate in trust on every use (TOEU) mode. In TOEU mode, when an address is discovered, it is added to the realized bindings list and when it is deleted or expired, it is removed from the realized bindings list. DHCP snooping and VM Tools always operate in TOEU mode.