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Guide to the Secure Configuration of Red Hat Virtualization 4

Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark

  • System Accounting with auditd

    The <code>auditd</code> program can perform comprehensive monitoring of system activity. This section makes use of recommended configuration settin...
    Group
  • AppArmor

    Many security vulnerabilities result from bugs in trusted programs. A trusted program runs with privileges that attackers want to possess. The prog...
    Group
  • GRUB2 bootloader configuration

    During the boot process, the boot loader is responsible for starting the execution of the kernel and passing options to it. The boot loader allows ...
    Group
  • L1TF vulnerability mitigation

    Defines the L1TF vulneratility mitigations to employ.
    Value
  • MDS vulnerability mitigation

    Defines the MDS vulneratility mitigation to employ.
    Value
  • Confidence level on Hardware Random Number Generator

    Defines the level of trust on the hardware random number generators available in the system and the percentage of entropy to credit.
    Value
  • Spec Store Bypass Mitigation

    This controls how the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) vulnerability is mitigated.
    Value
  • Disable Recovery Booting

    Red Hat Virtualization 4 systems support an "recovery boot" option that can be used to prevent services from being started. The <code>GRUB_DISABLE_...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • IOMMU configuration directive

    On x86 architecture supporting VT-d, the IOMMU manages the access control policy between the hardware devices and some of the system critical u...
    Rule Unknown Severity
  • Configure L1 Terminal Fault mitigations

    L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) is a hardware vulnerability which allows unprivileged speculative access to data which is available in the Level 1 Data Ca...
    Rule High Severity
  • Force kernel panic on uncorrected MCEs

    A Machine Check Exception is an error generated by the CPU itdetects an error in itself, memory or I/O devices. These errors may be corrected and g...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • 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
  • net.ipv6.conf.default.accept_ra_rtr_pref

    Accept router preference in router advertisements?
    Value
  • 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
  • net.ipv6.conf.default.accept_ra

    Accept default router advertisements by default?
    Value
  • net.ipv6.conf.default.accept_redirects

    Toggle ICMP Redirect Acceptance By Default
    Value
  • Verify /boot/grub2/user.cfg Group Ownership

    The file <code>/boot/grub2/user.cfg</code> should be group-owned by the <code>root</code> group to prevent reading or modification of the file. To...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Verify /boot/grub2/grub.cfg User Ownership

    The file <code>/boot/grub2/grub.cfg</code> should be owned by the <code>root</code> user to prevent destruction or modification of the file. To pr...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Verify /boot/grub2/user.cfg User Ownership

    The file <code>/boot/grub2/user.cfg</code> should be owned by the <code>root</code> user to prevent reading or modification of the file. To proper...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Verify /boot/grub2/grub.cfg Permissions

    File permissions for <code>/boot/grub2/grub.cfg</code> should be set to 600. To properly set the permissions of <code>/boot/grub2/grub.cfg</code>,...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Verify /boot/grub2/user.cfg Permissions

    File permissions for <code>/boot/grub2/user.cfg</code> should be set to 600. To properly set the permissions of <code>/boot/grub2/user.cfg</code>,...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Set the Boot Loader Admin Username to a Non-Default Value

    The grub2 boot loader should have a superuser account and password protection enabled to protect boot-time settings. <br><br> To maximize the prote...
    Rule High Severity
  • Boot Loader Is Not Installed On Removeable Media

    The system must not allow removable media to be used as the boot loader. Remove alternate methods of booting the system from removable media. <code...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Set Boot Loader Password in grub2

    The grub2 boot loader should have a superuser account and password protection enabled to protect boot-time settings. <br><br> Since plaintext passw...
    Rule High Severity
  • UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration

    UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration
    Group
  • Verify /boot/grub2/user.cfg Group Ownership

    The file <code>/boot/grub2/user.cfg</code> should be group-owned by the <code>root</code> group to prevent reading or modification of the file. To...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Verify /boot/grub2/user.cfg User Ownership

    The file <code>/boot/grub2/user.cfg</code> should be owned by the <code>root</code> user to prevent reading or modification of the file. To proper...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Set the UEFI Boot Loader Admin Username to a Non-Default Value

    The grub2 boot loader should have a superuser account and password protection enabled to protect boot-time settings. <br><br> To maximize the prote...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Set the UEFI Boot Loader Password

    The grub2 boot loader should have a superuser account and password protection enabled to protect boot-time settings. <br><br> Since plaintext passw...
    Rule High Severity
  • 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 Red Hat Virt...
    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
  • net.ipv6.conf.default.accept_source_route

    Trackers could be using source-routed packets to generate traffic that seems to be intra-net, but actually was created outside and has been redirec...
    Value
  • Disable hibernation

    Enable the suspend to disk (STD) functionality, which is usually called "hibernation" in user interfaces. STD checkpoints the system and powers it ...
    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
  • Disable the 32-bit vDSO

    Certain buggy versions of glibc (2.3.3) will crash if they are presented with a 32-bit vDSO that is not mapped at the address indicated in its segm...
    Rule Low Severity
  • Enable checks on credential management

    Enable this to turn on some debug checking for credential management. The additional code keeps track of the number of pointers from task_structs t...
    Rule Low Severity

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