The operating system must use cryptography to protect the integrity of remote access sessions.

From Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Workstation STIG

Associated with: CCI-001453

SV-65631r1_rule The operating system must use cryptography to protect the integrity of remote access sessions.

Vulnerability discussion

Remote access is any access to an organizational operating system by a user (or an information system) communicating through an external, non-organization-controlled network. If cryptography is not used to protect these sessions, then the session data traversing the remote connection could be intercepted and potentially modified. Cryptography provides a means to secure the remote connection to prevent unauthorized access to the data traversing the remote access connection, thereby providing a degree of integrity. The encryption strength of mechanism is selected based on the security categorization of the information traversing the remote connection.

Check content

The service "telnet" should be disabled, to check the status of the service, run the following command: sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "print com.apple.telnetd:Disabled" /var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd/overrides.plist If the returned value isn't "true" or doesn't exist, this is a finding.

Fix text

To set the telnet service to disabled, run the following command: sudo defaults write /private/var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd/overrides.plist "com.apple.telnetd" -dict Disabled -bool true

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.