6.6.3 Ensure Idle Timeout is set for all Login Classes

Information

All login classes should have an idle timeout defined.

Rationale:

Controlling the level of access which users are granted when logging into a router, helps protect against both malicious attacks and accidental misconfiguration of the router by less experienced staff.

Login classes should be defined to grant permissions to user accounts, both local and remote, allowing permissions to be managed in a similar manner to User Groups on a Microsoft Windows system.

All login classes should have an Idle Timeout of no more than 15 minutes configured, so that unused sessions are automatically logged out after this time, limiting the scope for abuse of unattended sessions.

Note - The built in Super-User Class does not have an Idle Timeout configured and, for this reason, should be used extremely sparingly if at all.

Solution

Configure the Idle Timeout for a class using the following command under the [edit system login] hierarchy:

[edit system login]
user@host#set class <class name> idle-timeout <timeout in minutes>

Default Value:

No idle timeout is defined by default.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/3069