Vulnerability Discussion

Disabling firewire protects the system against exploitation of any flaws in its implementation.

Check

Verify that RHEL 9 disables the ability to load the firewire-core kernel module with the following command:

$ sudo grep -r firewire-core /etc/modprobe.conf /etc/modprobe.d/*

blacklist firewire-core

If the command does not return any output, or the line is commented out, and use of firewire-core is not documented with the information system security officer (ISSO) as an operational requirement, this is a finding.

Fix

To configure the system to prevent the firewire-core kernel module from being loaded, add the following line to the file /etc/modprobe.d/firewire-core.conf (or create firewire-core.conf if it does not exist):

install firewire-core /bin/false
blacklist firewire-core