EPAS-00-004000 - Access to external executables must be disabled or restricted.

Information

Information systems are capable of providing a wide variety of functions and services. Some of the functions and services, provided by default, may not be necessary to support essential organizational operations (e.g., key missions, functions).

It is detrimental for applications to provide, or install by default, functionality exceeding requirements or mission objectives.

Applications must adhere to the principles of least functionality by providing only essential capabilities.

DBMSs may spawn additional external processes to execute procedures that are defined in the DBMS but stored in external host files (external procedures). The spawned process used to execute the external procedure may operate within a different OS security context than the DBMS and provide unauthorized access to the host system.

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

Solution

Review the EDB Postgres Advanced Server packages available in the installation guide here: https://www.enterprisedb.com/docs/epas/<version number>/

Uninstall all packages that are not required by running the following as the 'root' user:

> yum erase -y <package-name>

At a minimum, the edb-as<version>-server-* packages are required. Additionally, other packages such as pem, jdbc, postgis, pgpool, and others may be required by applications that need the functionality provided in these additional packages.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_EPAS_V2R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-7a., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000381, Rule-ID|SV-259243r960963_rule, STIG-ID|EPAS-00-004000, Vuln-ID|V-259243

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 45d29621aa5ac2ed22ffc0990438eb191d1b1b708b54cb905ce2c470737cd948