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V-258857

CAT I (High)

The Photon operating system must configure Secure Shell (SSH) to disallow HostbasedAuthentication.

Rule ID

SV-258857r933632_rule

STIG

VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Appliance Photon OS 4.0 Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V1R1

CCIs

CCI-000366

Discussion

SSH trust relationships enable trivial lateral spread after a host compromise and therefore must be explicitly disabled.

Check Content

At the command line, run the following command to verify the running configuration of sshd:

# sshd -T|&grep -i HostbasedAuthentication

Example result:

hostbasedauthentication no

If "HostbasedAuthentication" is not set to "no", this is a finding.

Fix Text

Navigate to and open:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

Ensure the "HostbasedAuthentication" line is uncommented and set to the following:

HostbasedAuthentication no

At the command line, run the following command:

# systemctl restart sshd.service