VCWN-06-000004 - The system must terminate management sessions after 10 minutes of inactivity.

Information

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, de-allocating associated TCP/IP address/port pairs at the operating system level, or de-allocating 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 application terminates all sessions or network access; it only ends the inactive session and releases the resources associated with that session.

NOTE: Nessus has not performed this check. Please review the benchmark to ensure target compliance.

Solution

You can change the timeout value by editing the webclient.properties file.

On the system where vCenter is installed locate the webclient.properties file.

Windows: C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\cfg\vsphere-client
Appliance: /etc/vmware/vsphere-client/

Edit the file to include the line 'session.timeout = 10' where 10 is the timeout value in minutes. Uncomment the line if necessary.

After editing the file the vSphere Web Client service must be restarted.

See Also

http://iasecontent.disa.mil/stigs/zip/U_VMware_vSphere_6-0_vCenter_Server_for_Windows_V1R4_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: SYSTEM AND COMMUNICATIONS PROTECTION

References: 800-53|SC-10, CAT|II, CCI|CCI-001133, Group-ID|V-63947, Rule-ID|SV-78437r1_rule, STIG-ID|VCWN-06-000004, Vuln-ID|V-63947

Plugin: VMware

Control ID: 721593964e24f00d522974b1e81e9ef43f8aaf9a7991d84cb594e16c79a42a3c