1.1.9 Disable Automounting

Warning! Audit Deprecated

This audit has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.

View Next Audit Version

Information

autofs allows automatic mounting of devices, typically including CD/DVDs and USB drives.

Rationale:

With automounting enabled anyone with physical access could attach a USB drive or disc and have its contents available in system even if they lacked permissions to mount it themselves.

Impact:

The use of portable hard drives is very common for workstation users. If your organization allows the use of portable storage or media on workstations and physical access controls to workstations is considered adequate there is little value add in turning off automounting.

Solution

If there are no other packages that depends on autofs, remove the package with:

# dnf remove autofs

Run the following command to disable autofs if it is required:

# systemctl --now disable autofs

Additional Information:

This control should align with the tolerance of the use of portable drives and optical media in the organization. On a server requiring an admin to manually mount media can be part of defense-in-depth to reduce the risk of unapproved software or information being introduced or proprietary software or information being exfiltrated. If admins commonly use flash drives and Server access has sufficient physical controls, requiring manual mounting may not increase security.

NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5:

SC-18(4)

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/3807