Vulnerability Discussion

Terminating an idle SSH 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 SSH session will also free 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 and deallocating 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 operating system terminates all sessions or network access; it only ends the inactive session and releases the resources associated with that session.

OL 8 uses "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" for configurations of OpenSSH. Within the "sshd_config", the product of the values of "ClientAliveInterval" and "ClientAliveCountMax" are used to establish the inactivity threshold. The "ClientAliveInterval" is a timeout interval in seconds after which if no data has been received from the client, sshd will send a message through the encrypted channel to request a response from the client. The "ClientAliveCountMax" is the number of client alive messages that may be sent without sshd receiving any messages back from the client. If this threshold is met, sshd will disconnect the client. For more information on these settings and others, refer to the sshd_config man pages.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000126-GPOS-00066, SRG-OS-000163-GPOS-00072, SRG-OS-000279-GPOS-00109

Check

Verify all network connections associated with SSH traffic are automatically terminated at the end of the session.

Check that the "ClientAliveCountMax" is set to "0" by running the following command:

$ sudo grep -i ClientAliveCountMax /etc/ssh/sshd_config

ClientAliveCountMax 0

If "ClientAliveCountMax" does not exist, does not have a product value of "0" in "/etc/ssh/sshd_config", or is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure OL 8 to automatically terminate all network connections associated with SSH traffic at the end of a session.

Modify or append the following line in the "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" file:

ClientAliveCountMax 0

In order for the changes to take effect, the SSH daemon must be restarted.

$ sudo systemctl restart sshd.service