The vCenter STS service must limit the number of maximum concurrent connections permitted.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-258970	VCST-80-000001	SV-258970r934568_rule		Medium

Description
Resource exhaustion can occur when an unlimited number of concurrent requests are allowed on a website, facilitating a denial-of-service attack. Unless the number of requests is controlled, the web server can consume enough system resources to cause a system crash. Mitigating this kind of attack will include limiting the number of concurrent HTTP/HTTPS requests. In Tomcat, each incoming request requires a thread for the duration of that request. If more simultaneous requests are received than can be handled by the currently available request processing threads, additional threads will be created up to the value of the maxThreads attribute. Satisfies: SRG-APP-000001-AS-000001, SRG-APP-000435-AS-000163

Description

Resource exhaustion can occur when an unlimited number of concurrent requests are allowed on a website, facilitating a denial-of-service attack. Unless the number of requests is controlled, the web server can consume enough system resources to cause a system crash. Mitigating this kind of attack will include limiting the number of concurrent HTTP/HTTPS requests. In Tomcat, each incoming request requires a thread for the duration of that request. If more simultaneous requests are received than can be handled by the currently available request processing threads, additional threads will be created up to the value of the maxThreads attribute. Satisfies: SRG-APP-000001-AS-000001, SRG-APP-000435-AS-000163

STIG	Date
VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Appliance Secure Token Service (STS) Security Technical Implementation Guide	2023-10-29

Details

Check Text ( C-62710r934566_chk )
At the command prompt, run the following command: # xmllint --xpath '/Server/Service/Executor[@name="tomcatThreadPool"]/@maxThreads' /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/conf/server.xml Expected result: maxThreads="150" If the output does not match the expected result, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-62619r934567_fix)
Navigate to and open: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/conf/server.xml Navigate to the node with the name of tomcatThreadPool and configure with the value "maxThreads="150"". Note: The node should be configured similar to the following: minSpareThreads="50" name="tomcatThreadPool" namePrefix="tomcat-http--"/> Restart the service with the following command: # vmon-cli --restart sts