SV-217905r603264: The system must require authentication upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes. | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide

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Assessment Title

Rule Text

The system must require authentication upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes.

Description

Discussion Text

This prevents attackers with physical access from trivially bypassing security on the machine and gaining root access. Such accesses are further prevented by configuring the bootloader password.

How this relates to the STIG checklist: STIG vs SCAP benchmark.

IA Controls

NIST SP 800-53

Not mappedCCI-000213CCE-27040-5V-38586SV-50387

References

DPMS Target Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 DISA DPMS Target Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 4046

Checks

DISA STIG (Manual Reference)

To check if authentication is required for single-user mode, run the following command: 

$ grep SINGLE /etc/sysconfig/init

The output should be the following: 

SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin


If the output is different, this is a finding.

SCC Automation Reference

The reconstructed evaluation script behind this rule's OVAL check(s) — every module a compound check combines, with this rule's own concrete values and DISA's SCC tool's real per-module mechanism curated from static teardown of SCC releases.

#!/bin/bash
# Reconstructed from oval:mil.disa.fso.redhat.rhel6:def:3000
# The system must require authentication upon booting into single-user and maintenance modes.
# Per-module read mechanism curated from static teardown of DISA's SCC tool
# (SCAP Compliance Checker) -- see the SCC Automation Reference above.

# Conditions are satisfied
# textfilecontent54_object (textfilecontent54_test)
test_1() {
  grep -Pq '^SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin[\s]*' '/etc/sysconfig/init' &>/dev/null
}

if test_1; then
  echo "PASS"
else
  echo "FAIL"
fi

Assessment Script Powered by AISandbox-executed

A standalone Shell script to assess this control automatically. Review before running it in your environment.

Syntax-checked and actually executed in an isolated sandbox (not the real system this checks) — confirmed to run without errors.

#!/bin/sh
# OVAL Definition: oval:mil.disa.fso.redhat.rhel6:def:3000
if [ ! -f "/etc/sysconfig/init" ]; then echo "PASS"; exit 0; fi; \
grep -q "^SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin[\\s]*" /etc/sysconfig/init && echo "PASS" || echo "FAIL"; exit 0

Remediation

Single-user mode is intended as a system recovery method, providing a single user root access to the system by providing a boot option at startup. By default, no authentication is performed if single-user mode is selected. 

To require entry of the root password even if the system is started in single-user mode, add or correct the following line in the file "/etc/sysconfig/init": 

SINGLE=/sbin/sulogin