PGS9-00-010600 - PostgreSQL must invalidate session identifiers upon user logout or other session termination - tcp_keepalives_idle

Information

Captured sessions can be reused in 'replay' attacks. This requirement limits the ability of adversaries to capture and continue to employ previously valid session IDs.

This requirement focuses on communications protection for PostgreSQL session rather than for the network packet. The intent of this control is to establish grounds for confidence at each end of a communications session in the ongoing identity of the other party and in the validity of the information being transmitted.

Session IDs are tokens generated by PostgreSQLs to uniquely identify a user's (or process's) session. DBMSs will make access decisions and execute logic based on the session ID.

Unique session IDs help to reduce predictability of said identifiers. Unique session IDs address man-in-the-middle attacks, including session hijacking or insertion of false information into a session. If the attacker is unable to identify or guess the session information related to pending application traffic, they will have more difficulty in hijacking the session or otherwise manipulating valid sessions.

When a user logs out, or when any other session termination event occurs, PostgreSQL must terminate the user session(s) to minimize the potential for sessions to be hijacked.

Solution

Note: The following instructions use the PGDATA and PGVER environment variables. See supplementary content APPENDIX-F for instructions on configuring PGDATA and APPENDIX-H for PGVER.

As the database administrator (shown here as 'postgres'), edit postgresql.conf:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ vi $PGDATA/postgresql.conf

Set the following parameters to organizational requirements:

statement_timeout = 10000 #milliseconds
tcp_keepalives_idle = 10 # seconds
tcp_keepalives_interval = 10 # seconds
tcp_keepalives_count = 10

Now, as the system administrator, restart the server with the new configuration:

# SYSTEMD SERVER ONLY
$ sudo systemctl restart postgresql-${PGVER?}

# INITD SERVER ONLY
$ sudo service postgresql-${PGVER?} restart

Item Details

Audit Name: DISA STIG PostgreSQL 9.x on RHEL DB v2r3

Category: SYSTEM AND COMMUNICATIONS PROTECTION

Plugin: PostgreSQLDB

Control ID: 914794794ec6628cf4b54524577f30a443630eeebbdbd46fd09c5a0a4087add7

Detections

Analytics

PGS9-00-010600 - PostgreSQL must invalidate session identifiers upon user logout or other session termination - tcp_keepalives_idle

Information

Solution

See Also

Item Details