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VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Security Technical Implementation Guide

Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark

  • The vCenter Server must enable FIPS-validated cryptography.

    FIPS 140-2 is the current standard for validating that mechanisms used to access cryptographic modules use authentication that meets DOD requirements. In vSphere 6.7 and later, ESXi and vCenter Se...
    Rule High Severity
  • The vCenter Server must terminate vSphere Client sessions after 15 minutes of inactivity.

    Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port th...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter Server must manage excess capacity, bandwidth, or other redundancy to limit the effects of information flooding types of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by enabling Network I/O Control (NIOC).

    DoS is a condition when a resource is not available for legitimate users. When this occurs, the organization either cannot accomplish its mission or must operate at degraded capacity. Managing exc...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter Server must set the interval for counting failed login attempts to at least 15 minutes.

    By limiting the number of failed login attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute forcing, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the a...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter server must provide an immediate real-time alert to the system administrator (SA) and information system security officer (ISSO), at a minimum, of all audit failure events requiring real-time alerts.

    It is critical for the appropriate personnel to be aware if a system is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required. Without a real-time alert, security personnel may be unaware of an impe...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter Server Machine Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate must be issued by a DOD certificate authority.

    Untrusted certificate authorities (CA) can issue certificates, but they may be issued by organizations or individuals that seek to compromise DOD systems or by organizations with insufficient secur...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter server must enforce SNMPv3 security features where SNMP is required.

    SNMPv3 supports commercial-grade security, including authentication, authorization, access control, and privacy. Previous versions of the protocol contained well-known security weaknesses that were...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter Server must set the distributed port group Forged Transmits policy to "Reject".

    If the virtual machine operating system changes the Media Access Control (MAC) address, the operating system can send frames with an impersonated source MAC address at any time. This allows an oper...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter Server must set the distributed port group Promiscuous Mode policy to "Reject".

    When promiscuous mode is enabled for a virtual switch, all virtual machines connected to the port group have the potential of reading all packets across that network, meaning only the virtual machi...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The vCenter Server must not configure VLAN Trunking unless Virtual Guest Tagging (VGT) is required and authorized.

    When a port group is set to VLAN Trunking, the vSwitch passes all network frames in the specified range to the attached virtual machines without modifying the virtual local area network (VLAN) tags...
    Rule Medium Severity

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