VMware vSphere 8.0 ESXi Security Technical Implementation Guide
Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark
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The ESXi host Secure Shell (SSH) daemon must be configured to not allow gateway ports.
SSH Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection forwarding provides a mechanism to establish TCP connections proxied by the SSH server. This function can provide convenience similar to a virtual...Rule Low Severity -
The ESXi host must enable Bridge Protocol Data Units (BPDU) filter on the host to prevent being locked out of physical switch ports with Portfast and BPDU Guard enabled.
BPDU Guard and Portfast are commonly enabled on the physical switch to which the ESXi host is directly connected to reduce the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) convergence delay. If a BPDU packet is s...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must configure virtual switch security policies to reject Media Access Control (MAC) address changes.
If the virtual machine (VM) operating system changes the MAC address, it can send frames with an impersonated source MAC address at any time. This allows it to stage malicious attacks on the device...Rule High Severity -
The ESXi host must not suppress warnings about unmitigated hyperthreading vulnerabilities.
The L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) CPU vulnerabilities published in 2018 have patches and mitigations available in vSphere. However, there are performance impacts to these mitigations that require carefu...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must enable volatile key destruction.
By default, pages allocated for virtual machines (VMs), userspace applications, and kernel threads are zeroed out at allocation time. ESXi will always ensure that no nonzero pages are exposed to VM...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must use DOD-approved certificates.
The default self-signed host certificate issued by the VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) must be replaced with a DOD-approved certificate when the host will be accessed directly, such as during a...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must enable audit logging.
ESXi offers both local and remote audit recordkeeping to meet the requirements of the NIAP Virtualization Protection Profile and Server Virtualization Extended Package. Local records are stored on ...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must enable strict x509 verification for SSL syslog endpoints.
When sending syslog data to a remote host via SSL, the ESXi host is presented with the endpoint's SSL server certificate. In addition to trust verification, configured elsewhere, this "x509-strict"...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must forward audit records containing information to establish what type of events occurred.
Without establishing what types of events occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. Audit record content that may be n...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host when using Host Profiles and/or Auto Deploy must use the vSphere Authentication Proxy to protect passwords when adding themselves to Active Directory.
If a host is configured to join an Active Directory domain using Host Profiles and/or Auto Deploy, the Active Directory credentials are saved in the profile and are transmitted over the network. T...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must not enable log filtering.
The log filtering capability allows users to modify the logging policy of the syslog service that is running on an ESXi host. Users can create log filters to reduce the number of repetitive entries...Rule Medium Severity -
The ESXi host must disable key persistence.
When using a standard key provider, the ESXi host relies on vCenter Server to manage the encryption keys. When using a trusted key provider, the ESXi host relies directly on the Trust Authority Hos...Rule Medium Severity
Node 2
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