Title

Host-based authentication for login-based services must be disabled. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

The use of .rhosts authentication is an insecure protocol and can be replaced with public-key authentication using Secure Shell. As automatic authentication settings in the .rhosts files can provide a malicious user with sensitive system credentials, the use of .rhosts files should be disabled.

Check Content

Note: This is the location for Solaris 11.1. For earlier versions, the information is in /etc/pam.conf. Determine if host-based authentication services are enabled. # grep 'pam_rhosts_auth.so.1' /etc/pam.conf /etc/pam.d/*| grep -vc '^#' If the returned result is not 0 (zero), this is a finding.

Fix Text

Note: This is the location for Solaris 11.1. For earlier versions, the information is in /etc/pam.conf. The root role is required. # ls -l /etc/pam.d to identify the various configuration files used by PAM. Search each file for the pam_rhosts_auth.so.1 entry. # grep pam_rhosts_auth.so.1 [filename] Identify the file with the line pam_hosts_auth.so.1 in it. # pfedit [filename] Insert a comment character (#) at the beginning of the line containing "pam_hosts_auth.so.1".

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-216120r603268_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-216120

Group Title: SRG-OS-000480

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

Controls tied to check. These are derived from the CCIs shown above.