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2.6.8 Ensure an Administrator Password Is Required to Access System-Wide Preferences

Warning! Audit Deprecated

This audit has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.

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Information

System Preferences controls system and user settings on a macOS Computer. System Preferences allows the user to tailor their experience on the computer as well as allowing the System Administrator to configure global security settings. Some of the settings should only be altered by the person responsible for the computer.

Rationale:

By requiring a password to unlock system-wide System Preferences, the risk of a user changing configurations that affect the entire system is mitigated and requires an admin user to re-authenticate to make changes.

Impact:

Users will need to enter their password to unlock some additional preference panes that are unlocked by default like Network, Startup and Printers & Scanners.

Solution

Graphical Method:
Perform the following steps to verify that an administrator password is required to access system-wide preferences:

Open System Settings

Select Privacy & Security

Select Advanced

Set Require an administrator password to access system-wide settings to enabled

Terminal Method:
The authorizationdb settings cannot be written to directly, so the plist must be exported out to a temporary file. Changes can be made to the temporary plist, then imported back into the authorizationdb settings.
Run the following commands to enable that an administrator password is required to access system-wide preferences:

$ authDBs=('system.preferences' 'system.preferences.energysaver' 'system.preferences.network' 'system.preferences.printing' 'system.preferences.sharing' 'system.preferences.softwareupdate' 'system.preferences.startupdisk' 'system.preferences.timemachine')

 for section in ${authDBs[@]}; do
 /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/security -q authorizationdb read '$section' > '/tmp/$section.plist'
 key_value=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'Print :shared' '/tmp/$section.plist' 2>&1)
 if [[ '$key_value' == *'Does Not Exist'* ]]; then
 /usr/bin/sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'Add :shared bool false' '/tmp/$section.plist'
 else
 /usr/bin/sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'Set :shared false' '/tmp/$section.plist'
 fi
 /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/security -q authorizationdb write '$section' < '/tmp/$section.plist'
 done

Note: Every audit and remediation incudes sudo before all commands. This is an exception because authdb is a variable and using sudo causes an error in the output.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/14562

Item Details

References: CSCv7|5.1

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: b2ce66da858a467e441dd16fe5ad91983b93f73abb6b32873c094c8d379ed7ec