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

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-38586	RHEL-06-000069	SV-50387r1_rule		Medium

Description
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.

STIG	Date
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2016-06-05

Details

Check Text ( C-46145r1_chk )
To check if authentication is required for single-user mode, run the following command: $ grep SINGLE /etc/sysconfig/init The output should be the following: SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin If the output is different, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-43534r1_fix)
Single-user mode is intended as a system recovery method, providing a single user root access to the system by providing a boot option at startup. By default, no authentication is performed if single-user mode is selected. To require entry of the root password even if the system is started in single-user mode, add or correct the following line in the file "/etc/sysconfig/init": SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin

Fix Text (F-43534r1_fix)

Single-user mode is intended as a system recovery method, providing a single user root access to the system by providing a boot option at startup. By default, no authentication is performed if single-user mode is selected.

To require entry of the root password even if the system is started in single-user mode, add or correct the following line in the file "/etc/sysconfig/init":

SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin