cis-gcp-cos-6.2.14

DevOps & Security

Ensure no users have .rhosts files

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6.2.14 Ensure no users have .rhosts files (Automated)

Description

While no .rhosts files are shipped by default, users can easily create them.

Rationale

This action is only meaningful if .rhosts support is permitted in the file /etc/pam.conf. Even though the .rhosts files are ineffective if support is disabled in /etc/pam.conf, they may have been brought over from other systems and could contain information useful to an attacker for those other systems.

Audit Procedure

Run the following script and verify no results are returned:

#!/bin/bash

grep -E -v '^(root|halt|sync|shutdown)' /etc/passwd | awk -F: '($7 != "'"$(which nologin)"'" && $7 != "/bin/false") { print $1 " " $6 }' | while read user dir; do
  if [ ! -d "$dir" ]; then
    echo "The home directory ($dir) of user $user does not exist."
  else
    for file in $dir/.rhosts; do
      if [ ! -h "$file" -a -f "$file" ]; then
        echo ".rhosts file in $dir"
      fi
    done
  fi
done

Expected Result

No results should be returned.

Remediation

Making global modifications to users' files without alerting the user community can result in unexpected outages and unhappy users. Therefore, it is recommended that a monitoring policy be established to report user .rhosts files and determine the action to be taken in accordance with site policy.

Additional Information

On some distributions the /sbin/nologin should be replaced with /usr/sbin/nologin.

CIS Controls

Controls Version	Control	IG 1	IG 2	IG 3
v8	3.11 Encrypt Sensitive Data at Rest		x	x
v7	16.4 Encrypt or Hash all Authentication Credentials		x	x

Profile

Level 2 - Server