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PHTN-40-000046 - The Photon operating system must require authentication upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes.

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Information

If the system does not require authentication before it boots into single-user mode, anyone with console access to the system can trivially access all files on the system. GRUB2 is the boot loader for Photon OS and can be configured to require a password to boot into single-user mode or make modifications to the boot menu.

Note: Photon does not support building grub changes via grub2-mkconfig.

Solution

Before proceeding, ensure a snapshot is taken to rollback if needed.

At the command line, run the following command to generate a grub password:

# grub2-mkpasswd-pbkdf2

Enter a secure password and ensure this password is stored for break-glass situations. Users will not be able to recover the root account without knowing this separate password. Copy the resulting encrypted string.

An example string is below:

grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.983A13DF3C51BB2B5130F0B86DDBF0DEA1AAF766BD1F16B7840F79CE3E35494C4B99F505C99C150071E563DF1D7FE1F45456D5960C4C79DAB6C49298B02A5558.5B2C49E12D43CC5A876F6738462DE4EFC24939D4BE486CDB72CFBCD87FDE93FBAFCB817E01B90F23E53C2502C3230502BC3113BE4F80B0AFC0EE956E735F7F86

Note: The grub2 package must be installed to generate a password for grub.

Navigate to and open:

/boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Find the line that begins with "set rootpartition". Below this line, paste the following on its own line:

set superusers="root"

Note: The superusers name can be a value other than root and is not tied to an OS account.

Below this paste the following, substituting the user's own encrypted string from the steps above:

password_pbkdf2 root <YOUR-LONG-STRING-FROM-ABOVE>

Next edit the default Photon menuentry block with the "--unrestricted" parameter so that it will continue to boot without prompting for credentials, for example:

menuentry "Photon" --unrestricted {
 linux /boot/$photon_linux root=$rootpartition $photon_cmdline $systemd_cmdline audit=1
 if [ -f /boot/$photon_initrd ]; then
 initrd /boot/$photon_initrd
 fi
}

When booting now, if users press "e" when the Photon splash screen appears, users will be prompted for credentials before being presented the option to edit the boot loader before system startup.

Note: Photon does not support building grub changes via grub2-mkconfig.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_VMW_vSphere_8-0_Y24M08_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000213, Rule-ID|SV-258824r958472_rule, STIG-ID|PHTN-40-000046, Vuln-ID|V-258824

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: ae0ae489b993f5d6cf528bce4ceb7dd959bce6da7cf7e3da5ff2318c92308ea9