The Photon operating system must use mechanisms meeting the requirements of applicable federal laws, Executive orders, directives, policies, regulations, standards, and guidance for authentication to a cryptographic module.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-258827	PHTN-40-000059	SV-258827r933542_rule		Medium

Description
Unapproved mechanisms that are used for authentication to the cryptographic module are not verified and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide confidentiality or integrity, and DOD data may be compromised. Operating systems utilizing encryption are required to use FIPS-compliant mechanisms for authenticating to cryptographic modules. FIPS 140-2/140-3 is the current standard for validating that mechanisms used to access cryptographic modules utilize authentication that meets DOD requirements. This allows for Security Levels 1, 2, 3, or 4 for use on a general purpose computing system.

Description

Unapproved mechanisms that are used for authentication to the cryptographic module are not verified and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide confidentiality or integrity, and DOD data may be compromised. Operating systems utilizing encryption are required to use FIPS-compliant mechanisms for authenticating to cryptographic modules. FIPS 140-2/140-3 is the current standard for validating that mechanisms used to access cryptographic modules utilize authentication that meets DOD requirements. This allows for Security Levels 1, 2, 3, or 4 for use on a general purpose computing system.

STIG	Date
VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Appliance Photon OS 4.0 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2023-10-29

Details

Check Text ( C-62567r933540_chk )
At the command line, run the following command to verify system-password is configured to encrypt representations of passwords: # grep sha512 /etc/pam.d/system-password Example result: password required pam_unix.so sha512 shadow use_authtok If the "pam_unix.so" module is not configured with the "sha512" parameter, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-62476r933541_fix)
Navigate to and open: /etc/pam.d/system-password Add or update the following line: password required pam_unix.so sha512 shadow use_authtok