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
:
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: Find sshd_config included files
shell: |-
included_files=$(grep -oP "^\s*(?i)include.*" /etc/ssh/sshd_config | sed -e 's/\s*Include\s*//i' | sed -e 's|^[^/]|/etc/ssh/&|')
[[ -n $included_files ]] && ls $included_files || true
register: sshd_config_included_files
when: ansible_virtualization_type not in ["docker", "lxc", "openvz", "podman", "container"]
Remediation - Shell Script
# Remediation is applicable only in certain platforms
if [ ! -f /.dockerenv ] && [ ! -f /run/.containerenv ]; then
# Find the include keyword, extract from the line the glob expression representing included files.
# And if it is a relative path prepend '/etc/ssh/'
included_files=$(grep -oP "^\s*(?i)include.*" /etc/ssh/sshd_config | sed -e 's/\s*include\s*//I' | sed -e 's|^[^/]|/etc/ssh/&|')