RHEL 8 operating systems booted with United Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) must require authentication upon booting into single-user mode and maintenance.

STIG ID: RHEL-08-010140  |  SRG: SRG-OS-000080-GPOS-00048 |  Severity: high |  CCI: CCI-000213 |  Vulnerability Id: V-230234 | 

Vulnerability Discussion

If the system does not require valid authentication before it boots into single-user or maintenance mode, anyone who invokes single-user or maintenance mode is granted privileged access to all files on the system. GRUB 2 is the default boot loader for RHEL 8 and is designed to require a password to boot into single-user mode or make modifications to the boot menu.

Check

For systems that use BIOS, this is Not Applicable.

Check to see if an encrypted grub superusers password is set. On systems that use UEFI, use the following command:

$ sudo grep -iw grub2_password /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/user.cfg

GRUB2_PASSWORD=grub.pbkdf2.sha512.[password_hash]

If the grub superusers password does not begin with "grub.pbkdf2.sha512", this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the system to require a grub bootloader password for the grub superusers account with the grub2-setpassword command, which creates/overwrites the /boot/efi/EFI/redhat/user.cfg file.

Generate an encrypted grub2 password for the grub superusers account with the following command:

$ sudo grub2-setpassword
Enter password:
Confirm password:
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