All public directories must be owned by root or an application account.

From MAC OSX 10.6 Workstation Security Technical Implementation Guide

Associated with IA controls: ECLP-1

Associated with: CCI-000225

SV-37993r1_rule All public directories must be owned by root or an application account.

Vulnerability discussion

If a public directory has the sticky bit set and is not owned by a privileged UID, unauthorized users may be able to modify files created by others.The only authorized public directories are those temporary directories supplied with the system or those designed to be temporary file repositories. The setting is normally reserved for directories used by the system and by users for temporary file storage (e.g., /tmp) and for directories requiring global read/write access.

Check content

Open a terminal session and enter the following command to verify the ownership of all public directories. find / -type d -perm -1002 -exec ls -ld {} \; If any public directory is not owned by root or an application user, this is a finding.

Fix text

Open a terminal session and enter the following command to change the owner of public directories to root or an application account. chown root /tmp (Replace root with an application user and/or "/tmp" with another public directory as necessary.)

Pro Tips

Lavender hyperlinks in small type off to the right (of CSS class id, if you view the page source) point to globally unique URIs for each document and item. Copy the link location and paste anywhere you need to talk unambiguously about these things.

You can obtain data about documents and items in other formats. Simply provide an HTTP header Accept: text/turtle or Accept: application/rdf+xml.