The Photon operating system must configure Secure Shell (SSH) to ignore user-specific trusted hosts lists.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-258880	PHTN-40-000217	SV-258880r933701_rule		Medium

Description
SSH trust relationships enable trivial lateral spread after a host compromise and therefore must be explicitly disabled. Individual users can have a local list of trusted remote machines, which must also be ignored while disabling host-based authentication generally.

STIG	Date
VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Appliance Photon OS 4.0 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2023-10-29

Details

Check Text ( C-62620r933699_chk )
At the command line, run the following command to verify the running configuration of sshd: # sshd -T|&grep -i IgnoreRhosts Example result: ignorerhosts yes If "IgnoreRhosts" is not set to "yes", this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-62529r933700_fix)
Navigate to and open: /etc/ssh/sshd_config Ensure the "IgnoreRhosts" line is uncommented and set to the following: IgnoreRhosts yes At the command line, run the following command: # systemctl restart sshd.service