Vulnerability Discussion

Failure to a secure state can address safety or security in accordance with the mission needs of the organization. Failure to a secure state helps prevent a loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability in the event of a failure of the information system or a component of the system. Preserving state information helps to facilitate the restart of the firewall application and a return to the operational mode with less disruption.

This requirement applies to a failure of the firewall function rather than the device or operating system as a whole, which is addressed in the Network Device Management SRG.

Since it is usually not possible to test this functionality in a production environment, systems should be validated either in a testing environment or prior to installation. This requirement is usually a function of the design of the firewall. Compliance can be verified by acceptance/validation processes or vendor attestation.

Check

View the firewall failover configuration or system documentation.

Verify that in the event of a system failure of the firewall function, the firewall saves diagnostic information, logs system messages, and loads the most current security policies, rules, and signatures. Testing of this functionality in a production environment is not recommended.

If in the event of a system failure of the firewall function the firewall does not save diagnostic information, log system messages, and load the most current security policies, rules, and signatures when restarted, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the firewall to fail securely in the event of a transiently corrupt state or failure condition.

When the system restarts, the system boot process must not succeed without passing all self-tests for cryptographic algorithms, RNG tests, and software integrity tests.