Title

Process core dumps must be disabled unless needed. (Cat III impact)

Discussion

Process core dumps contain the memory in use by the process when it crashed. Process core dump files can be of significant size and their use can result in file systems filling to capacity, which may result in Denial of Service. Process core dumps can be useful for software debugging.

Check Content

# ulimit -c If the above command does not return 0 and the enabling of core dumps has not been documented and approved by the IAO, this a finding.

Fix Text

Edit /etc/security/limits.conf and set a hard limit for "core" to 0 for all users.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-45679r1_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-11996

Group Title: GEN003500

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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