The operating system must employ strong identification and authentication techniques in the establishment of non-local maintenance and diagnostic sessions.

From Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Workstation STIG

Associated with: CCI-000877

SV-65721r1_rule The operating system must employ strong identification and authentication techniques in the establishment of non-local maintenance and diagnostic sessions.

Vulnerability discussion

Non-local maintenance and diagnostic activities are those activities conducted by individuals communicating through a network, either an external network (e.g., the Internet) or an internal network. The act of managing systems includes the ability to access system configuration details, diagnostic information, user information, as well as installation of software.

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

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