Title

All .rhosts, .shosts, .netrc, or hosts.equiv files must be accessible by only root or the owner. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

If these files are accessible by users other than root or the owner, they could be used by a malicious user to set up a system compromise.

Check Content

# for i in `cut -d: -f6 /etc/passwd | awk '$1 == "" {$1 = "/"} {print $1}'`; do ls -l $i/.rhosts $i/.shosts $i/.netrc; done # ls -l /etc/hosts.equiv # ls -l /etc/ssh/shosts.equiv If the .netrc, .rhosts, .shosts, hosts.equiv, or shosts.equiv files have permissions greater than 600, then this is a finding. (If a password entry has no home directory assigned, the root directory (/) is used as a default.)

Fix Text

Ensure the permission for these files is set at 600 or less and the owner is the owner of the home directory that it is in. These files, outside of home directories (other than hosts.equiv in /etc and shosts.equiv in /etc/ssh; both are owned by root), have no meaning.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-40341r1_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-4428

Group Title:

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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