Cron and crontab directories must be group-owned by root, sys, bin or cron.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
GEN003140-ESXI5-PNF	GEN003140-ESXI5-PNF	GEN003140-ESXI5-PNF_rule		Medium

Description
To protect the integrity of scheduled system jobs and to prevent malicious modification to these jobs, crontab files must be secured. Failure to give group-ownership of cron or crontab directories to a system group provides the designated group and unauthorized users with the potential to access sensitive information or change the system configuration which could weaken the system's security posture. Applicable, but permanent not-a-finding - Not a General Purpose (GP) OS. VMware's ESXi-v5 is a multi-user kernel where all users are "administrator" with either: Administrator with Full and partial (configurable) privileges, Read-only, or No Access. In this case, the file owner, group-owner and mode(s) have no meaning.

Description

To protect the integrity of scheduled system jobs and to prevent malicious modification to these jobs, crontab files must be secured. Failure to give group-ownership of cron or crontab directories to a system group provides the designated group and unauthorized users with the potential to access sensitive information or change the system configuration which could weaken the system's security posture. Applicable, but permanent not-a-finding - Not a General Purpose (GP) OS. VMware's ESXi-v5 is a multi-user kernel where all users are "administrator" with either: Administrator with Full and partial (configurable) privileges, Read-only, or No Access. In this case, the file owner, group-owner and mode(s) have no meaning.

STIG	Date
VMware ESXi v5 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2013-01-15

Details

Check Text ( C-GEN003140-ESXI5-PNF_chk )
ESXi supports this requirement and cannot be configured to be out of compliance. This is a permanent not a finding.

Fix Text (F-GEN003140-ESXI5-PNF_fix)
This requirement is permanent not a finding. No fix is required.