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Guide to the Secure Configuration of Ubuntu 18.04

Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • Non-UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration

    Non-UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration
    Group
    Show

  • UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration

    UEFI GRUB2 bootloader configuration
    Group
    Show

  • 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 Ubuntu 18.04...
    Group
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • Kernel Configuration

    Contains rules that check the kernel configuration that was used to build it.
    Group
    Show

  • Hash function for kernel module signing

    The hash function to use when signing modules during kernel build process.
    Value
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

  • 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
    Show

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