V-215765

Discussion

Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port that has been left unattended. In addition, quickly terminating an idle session will also free up resources committed by the managed network element. Terminating network connections associated with communications sessions includes, for example, deallocating associated TCP/IP address/port pairs at the operating system level and deallocating networking assignments at the application level if multiple application sessions are using a single operating system level network connection. ALGs may provide session control functionality as part of content filtering, load balancing, or proxy services.

Check Content

Verify the BIG-IP Core is configured to terminate all communications at the end of the session as follows:

Verify a Protocol Profile is configured to terminate a session at the end of a specified time.

Navigate to the BIG-IP System manager >> Local Traffic >> Profiles >> Protocol >> TCP.

Select a profile for an in-band managed session.

Verify the TCP profile "idle-timeout" is set to 600/900 seconds.

Select a profile for a user session.

Verify the TCP profile "idle-timeout" is set to 600/900 seconds.

Verify the BIG-IP LTM is configured to use the Protocol Profile.

Navigate to the BIG-IP System manager >> Local Traffic >> Virtual Servers >> Virtual Servers List tab.

Select the appropriate virtual server.

Verify the TCP profile "idle-timeout" is set to 600/900 seconds.

If the BIG-IP Core is not configured to terminate all communications session at the end of the session or as follows, this is a finding:

- For in-band management sessions (privileged sessions), the session must be terminated after 10 minutes of inactivity.
- For user sessions (nonprivileged sessions), the session must be terminated after 15 minutes of inactivity.