VMware vSphere 6.7 UI Tomcat STIG Version Comparison

There are 3 differences between versions v1 r1 (March 9, 2021) (the "left" version) and v1 r2 (Feb. 8, 2022) (the "right" version).

Check VCUI-67-000001 was changed between these two versions. Green, underlined text was added, red, struck-out text was removed.

The regular view of the left check and right check may be easier to read.

Title

vSphere UI must limit the amount of time that each TCP connection is kept alive.

Check Content

At the command prompt, execute the following command: # xmllint --format /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-ui/server/conf/server.xml | sed '2 s/xmlns=".*"//g' | xmllint --xpath '/Server/Service/Connector[@port="${http.port}"]/@connectionTimeout' - Expected result: connectionTimeout="20000" If result: connectionTimeout="300000" If the output does not match the expected result, this is a finding.

Discussion

Denial of service (DoS) is one threat against web servers. Many DoS attacks attempt to consume web server resources in such a way that no more resources are available to satisfy legitimate requests. In Tomcat, the "connectionTimeout" attribute sets the number of milliseconds the server will wait after accepting a connection for the request URI line to be presented. This timeout will also be used when reading the request body (if any). This prevents idle sockets that are not sending HTTP requests from consuming system resources and potentially denying new connections.

Fix

Navigate to and open /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-ui/server/conf/server.xml. Configure the http <Connector> node with the value: 'connectionTimeout="20000"' Example: <Connector value: 'connectionTimeout="300000"' Example: <Connector .. connectionTimeout="20000" connectionTimeout="300000" ..>