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V-215308

CAT II (Medium)

AIX system must require authentication upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes.

Rule ID

SV-215308r1268251_rule

STIG

IBM AIX 7.x Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V3R4

CCIs

CCI-000366

Discussion

This prevents attackers with physical access from trivially bypassing security on the machine and gaining root access. Such accesses are further prevented by configuring the bootloader password.

Check Content

Verify that the "root" account has a password assigned:

# cut -d: -f1,2 /etc/passwd | grep root

root:!

If the "root" account is not listed with an "!", this is a finding.

Fix Text

Assign the "root" account a password using passwd command while logged on as "root":
# passwd