Vulnerability Discussion

Emergency accounts are privileged accounts established in response to crisis situations where the need for rapid account activation is required. Therefore, emergency account activation may bypass normal account authorization processes. If these accounts are automatically disabled, system maintenance during emergencies may not be possible, thus adversely affecting system availability.

Emergency accounts are different from infrequently used accounts (i.e., local logon accounts used by the organization's system administrators when network or normal logon/access is not available). Infrequently used accounts are not subject to automatic termination dates. Emergency accounts are accounts created in response to crisis situations, usually for use by maintenance personnel. The automatic expiration or disabling time period may be extended as needed until the crisis is resolved; however, it must not be extended indefinitely. A permanent account should be established for privileged users who need long-term maintenance accounts.

To address access requirements, many RHEL systems can be integrated with enterprise-level authentication/access mechanisms that meet or exceed access control policy requirements.

Check

Verify emergency accounts have been provisioned with an expiration date of 72 hours.

For every existing emergency account, run the following command to obtain its account expiration information.

$ sudo chage -l system_account_name

Verify each of these accounts has an expiration date set within 72 hours.
If any emergency accounts have no expiration date set or do not expire within 72 hours, this is a finding.

Fix

If an emergency account must be created, configure the system to terminate the account after 72 hours with the following command to set an expiration date for the account. Substitute "system_account_name" with the account to be created.

$ sudo chage -E `date -d "+3 days" +%Y-%m-%d` system_account_name

The automatic expiration or disabling time period may be extended as needed until the crisis is resolved.