V-230499

Discussion

It is detrimental for operating systems to provide, or install by default, functionality exceeding requirements or mission objectives. These unnecessary capabilities or services are often overlooked and therefore may remain unsecured. They increase the risk to the platform by providing additional attack vectors. The IEEE 1394 (FireWire) is a serial bus standard for high-speed real-time communication. Disabling FireWire protects the system against exploitation of any flaws in its implementation.

Check Content

Verify the operating system disables the ability to load the firewire-core kernel module and ensure that the firewire-core kernel module is disabled with the following command:

$ sudo grep -r firewire-core /etc/modprobe.d/* | grep "blacklist"

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:install firewire-core /bin/false
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:blacklist firewire-core

If the command does not return any output, or the line is commented out, and use of the firewire-core protocol is not documented with the Information System Security Officer (ISSO) as an operational requirement, this is a finding.