VMCH-80-000204 Virtual machines (VMs) must enable encryption for Fault Tolerance.

Information

Fault Tolerance log traffic can be encrypted. This could contain sensitive data from the protected machine's memory or CPU instructions.

vSphere Fault Tolerance performs frequent checks between a primary VM and secondary VM so the secondary VM can quickly resume from the last successful checkpoint. The checkpoint contains the VM state that has been modified since the previous checkpoint.

When Fault Tolerance is turned on, FT encryption is set to "Opportunistic" by default, which means it enables encryption only if both the primary and secondary host are capable of encryption.

Solution

For each virtual machine do the following:

From the vSphere Client, right-click the Virtual Machine and go to Edit Settings >> VM Options >> Encryption.

For "Encrypted FT" set the value to "Opportunistic" or "Required". Click "OK".

or

From a PowerCLI command prompt while connected to the ESXi host or vCenter server, run the following commands:

$spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec
$spec.FTEncryption = New-Object VMware.Vim.VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpecEncryptedFtModes
$spec.FT = ftEncryptionOpportunistic or ftEncryptionRequired
(Get-VM -Name <vmname>).ExtensionData.ReconfigVM($spec)

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_VMW_vSphere_8-0_Y24M08_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-6b., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000366, Rule-ID|SV-258717r959010_rule, STIG-ID|VMCH-80-000204, Vuln-ID|V-258717

Plugin: VMware

Control ID: d63f80cdfb263a1336a2daa7089b73fa5b1d4395e25cbbbb81e34e714cfddc53