V-258128

Discussion

To mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information by entities that have been issued certificates by DoW-approved PKIs, all DoW systems (e.g., web servers and web portals) must be properly configured to incorporate access control methods that do not rely solely on the possession of a certificate for access. Successful authentication must not automatically give an entity access to an asset or security boundary. Authorization procedures and controls must be implemented to ensure each authenticated entity also has a validated and current authorization. Authorization is the process of determining whether an entity, once authenticated, is permitted to access a specific asset. Information systems use access control policies and enforcement mechanisms to implement this requirement. This requirement 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 RHEL 9 requires authentication for emergency mode with the following command:

$ grep sulogin /usr/lib/systemd/system/emergency.service 
ExecStart=-/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-sulogin-shell emergency

If the line is not returned from the default systemd file, use the following command to look for modifications to the emergency.service:

$ grep sulogin /etc/systemd/system/emergency.service.d/*.conf 

If the line is not returned from either location this is a finding.

Note: The configuration setting can only be in either the default location, or in the drop in file, not both locations.