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Enable PAM

An XCCDF Rule

Description

UsePAM Enables the Pluggable Authentication Module interface. If set to “yes” this will enable PAM authentication using ChallengeResponseAuthentication and PasswordAuthentication in addition to PAM account and session module processing for all authentication types. To enable PAM authentication, add or correct the following line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/00-complianceascode-hardening.conf:

UsePAM yes

Rationale

When UsePAM is set to yes, PAM runs through account and session types properly. This is important if you want to restrict access to services based off of IP, time or other factors of the account. Additionally, you can make sure users inherit certain environment variables on login or disallow access to the server.

ID
xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_sshd_enable_pam
Severity
Medium
References
Updated



Remediation - Ansible

- name: Enable PAM
  block:

  - name: Deduplicate values from /etc/ssh/sshd_config
    lineinfile:
      path: /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Remediation - Shell Script

# Remediation is applicable only in certain platforms
if [ ! -f /.dockerenv ] && [ ! -f /run/.containerenv ]; then

mkdir -p /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d
touch /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/00-complianceascode-hardening.conf