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Guide to the Secure Configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark

  • 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
  • Verify /boot/grub2/grub.cfg Group Ownership

    The file <code>/boot/grub2/grub.cfg</code> should be group-owned by the <code>root</code> group to prevent destruction or modification of the file....
    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 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
  • Disable vsyscalls

    To disable use of virtual syscalls, add the argument <code>vsyscall=none</code> to the default GRUB 2 command line for the Linux operating system. ...
    Rule Medium Severity

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