The system default umask for daemons must be 027 or 022.

From Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide

Associated with: CCI-000366

SV-50443r1_rule The system default umask for daemons must be 027 or 022.

Vulnerability discussion

The umask influences the permissions assigned to files created by a process at run time. An unnecessarily permissive umask could result in files being created with insecure permissions.

Check content

To check the value of the "umask", run the following command: $ grep umask /etc/init.d/functions The output should show either "022" or "027". If it does not, this is a finding.

Fix text

The file "/etc/init.d/functions" includes initialization parameters for most or all daemons started at boot time. The default umask of 022 prevents creation of group- or world-writable files. To set the default umask for daemons, edit the following line, inserting 022 or 027 for [UMASK] appropriately: umask [UMASK] Setting the umask to too restrictive a setting can cause serious errors at runtime. Many daemons on the system already individually restrict themselves to a umask of 077 in their own init scripts.

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