The Photon operating system must terminate idle Secure Shell (SSH) sessions.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-258867	PHTN-40-000203	SV-258867r933662_rule		Medium

Description
Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port that has been left unattended. In addition, quickly terminating an idle session will also free up resources committed by the managed network element. Terminating network connections associated with communications sessions includes, for example, deallocating associated TCP/IP address/port pairs at the operating system level, and deallocating networking assignments at the application level if multiple application sessions are using a single operating system-level network connection. This does not mean that the operating system terminates all sessions or network access; it only ends the inactive session and releases the resources associated with that session.

Description

Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port that has been left unattended. In addition, quickly terminating an idle session will also free up resources committed by the managed network element. Terminating network connections associated with communications sessions includes, for example, deallocating associated TCP/IP address/port pairs at the operating system level, and deallocating networking assignments at the application level if multiple application sessions are using a single operating system-level network connection. This does not mean that the operating system terminates all sessions or network access; it only ends the inactive session and releases the resources associated with that session.

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

Details

Check Text ( C-62607r933660_chk )
At the command line, run the following command to verify the running configuration of sshd: # sshd -T\|&grep -i ClientAliveCountMax Expected result: clientalivecountmax 0 If "ClientAliveCountMax" is not set to "0", this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-62516r933661_fix)
Navigate to and open: /etc/ssh/sshd_config Ensure the "ClientAliveCountMax" line is uncommented and set to the following: ClientAliveCountMax 0 At the command line, run the following command: # systemctl restart sshd.service