The system default umask for daemons must be 027 or 022.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-38642	RHEL-06-000346	SV-50443r1_rule		Low

Description
The umask influences the permissions assigned to files created by a process at run time. An unnecessarily permissive umask could result in files being created with insecure permissions.

STIG	Date
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2016-12-16

Details

Check Text ( C-46203r1_chk )
To check the value of the "umask", run the following command: $ grep umask /etc/init.d/functions The output should show either "022" or "027". If it does not, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-43592r1_fix)
The file "/etc/init.d/functions" includes initialization parameters for most or all daemons started at boot time. The default umask of 022 prevents creation of group- or world-writable files. To set the default umask for daemons, edit the following line, inserting 022 or 027 for [UMASK] appropriately: umask [UMASK] Setting the umask to too restrictive a setting can cause serious errors at runtime. Many daemons on the system already individually restrict themselves to a umask of 077 in their own init scripts.

Fix Text (F-43592r1_fix)

The file "/etc/init.d/functions" includes initialization parameters for most or all daemons started at boot time. The default umask of 022 prevents creation of group- or world-writable files. To set the default umask for daemons, edit the following line, inserting 022 or 027 for [UMASK] appropriately:

umask [UMASK]

Setting the umask to too restrictive a setting can cause serious errors at runtime. Many daemons on the system already individually restrict themselves to a umask of 077 in their own init scripts.