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Guide to the Secure Configuration of Ubuntu 16.04

Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark

  • 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 such cases, recent stores to the same memory loca...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Appropriate Action Must be Setup When the Internal Audit Event Queue is Full

    The audit system should have an action setup in the event the internal event queue becomes full. To setup an overflow action edit <code>/etc/audit/auditd.conf</code>. Set <code>overflow_action</cod...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • Write Audit Logs to the Disk

    To configure Audit daemon to write Audit logs to the disk, set write_logs to yes in /etc/audit/auditd.conf. This is the default setting.
    Rule Medium 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 generate a check log entry, if an error cannot be c...
    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 since Linux kernel 3.7. But it could be disabled t...
    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 credited entropy. Use <code>rng_core.default_quality<...
    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 separate and reduces the risk of kernel heap overflo...
    Rule Medium 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 enabled and following a system reboot, the root she...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • 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 reliable source to contribute to random-number entro...
    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

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