CD12-00-011500 - PostgreSQL must uniquely identify and authenticate organizational users (or processes acting on behalf of organizational users).

Information

To ensure accountability and prevent unauthenticated access, organizational users must be identified and authenticated to prevent potential misuse and compromise of the system.

Organizational users include organizational employees or individuals the organization deems to have equivalent status of employees (e.g., contractors). Organizational users (and any processes acting on behalf of users) must be uniquely identified and authenticated for all accesses, except the following:

(i) Accesses explicitly identified and documented by the organization. Organizations document specific user actions that can be performed on the information system without identification or authentication; and
(ii) Accesses that occur through authorized use of group authenticators without individual authentication. Organizations may require unique identification of individuals using shared accounts, for detailed accountability of individual activity.

NOTE: Nessus has provided the target output to assist in reviewing the benchmark to ensure target compliance.

Solution

Note: The following instructions use the PGDATA environment variable. See supplementary content APPENDIX-F for instructions on configuring PGDATA.

Configure PostgreSQL settings to uniquely identify and authenticate all organizational users who log on/connect to the system.

To create roles, use the following SQL:

CREATE ROLE <role_name> [OPTIONS]

For more information on CREATE ROLE, see the official documentation: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-createrole.html

For each role created, the database administrator can specify database authentication by editing pg_hba.conf:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ vi ${PGDATA?}/pg_hba.conf

An example pg_hba entry looks like this:

# TYPE DATABASE USER ADDRESS METHOD
host test_db bob 192.168.0.0/16 scram-sha-256

For more information on pg_hba.conf, see the official documentation: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.html.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_CD_PGSQL_V3R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION

References: 800-53|IA-2, CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000764, Rule-ID|SV-233612r960969_rule, STIG-ID|CD12-00-011500, Vuln-ID|V-233612

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: a0b6360923646e15877f5d288283de9c4a866def16495298ea9449201e256d6f