The Photon operating system must configure Secure Shell (SSH) to ignore user-specific known_host files.
Overview
| Finding ID | Version | Rule ID | IA Controls | Severity |
| V-258881 | PHTN-40-000218 | SV-258881r935567_rule | CCI-000366 | 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-258881r935567_chk)
At the command line, run the following command to verify the running configuration of sshd:
# sshd -T|&grep -i IgnoreUserKnownHosts
Expected result:
ignoreuserknownhosts yes
If "IgnoreUserKnownHosts" is not set to "yes", this is a finding.
Fix Text (F-62530r933703_fix)
Navigate to and open:
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
Ensure the "IgnoreUserKnownHosts" line is uncommented and set to the following:
IgnoreUserKnownHosts yes
At the command line, run the following command:
# systemctl restart sshd.service