Skip to content

The Photon operating system must send Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) timestamps.

An XCCDF Rule

Description

TCP timestamps are used to provide protection against wrapped sequence numbers. It is possible to calculate system uptime (and boot time) by analyzing TCP timestamps. These calculated uptimes can help a bad actor in determining likely patch levels for vulnerabilities.

ID
SV-256576r991589_rule
Version
PHTN-30-000107
Severity
Medium
References
Updated

Remediation Templates

A Manual Procedure

At the command line, run the following commands:

# sed -i -e "/^net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps/d" /etc/sysctl.conf
# echo net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps=1>>/etc/sysctl.conf
# /sbin/sysctl --load