V-258804

Discussion

Operating system management includes the ability to control the number of users and user sessions that utilize an operating system. Limiting the number of allowed users and sessions per user is helpful in reducing the risks related to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This requirement addresses concurrent sessions for information system accounts and does not address concurrent sessions by single users via multiple system accounts. The maximum number of concurrent sessions should be defined based upon mission needs and the operational environment for each system.

Check Content

At the command line, run the following command to verify the limit for the number of concurrent sessions:

# grep "^[^#].*maxlogins.*" /etc/security/limits.conf

Example result:

*       hard    maxlogins       10

If "* hard maxlogins" is not configured to "10", this is a finding.

Note: The expected result may be repeated multiple times.