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V-256746

CAT II (Medium)

The Security Token Service must limit the number of concurrent connections permitted.

Rule ID

SV-256746r889208_rule

STIG

VMware vSphere 7.0 vCenter Appliance STS Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V1R2

CCIs

CCI-000054

Discussion

Resource exhaustion can occur when an unlimited number of concurrent requests are allowed on a website, facilitating a denial-of-service attack. Unless the number of requests is controlled, the web server can consume enough system resources to cause a system crash. Mitigating this kind of attack will include limiting the number of concurrent HTTP/HTTPS requests. In Tomcat, each incoming request requires a thread for the duration of that request. If more simultaneous requests are received than can be handled by the currently available request processing threads, additional threads will be created up to the value of the "maxThreads" attribute.

Check Content

At the command prompt, run the following command: 
 
# xmllint --xpath '/Server/Service/Executor[@name="tomcatThreadPool"]/@maxThreads' /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/conf/server.xml 
 
Expected result: 
 
maxThreads="150" 
 
If the output does not match the expected result, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Navigate to and open: 
 
/usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/conf/server.xml 
 
Navigate to the <Executor> mode with the name of "tomcatThreadPool" and configure with the value 'maxThreads="150"' as follows: 
 
<Executor maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="50" name="tomcatThreadPool" namePrefix="tomcat-http--" /> 
 
Restart the service with the following command: 
 
# vmon-cli --restart sts