VCLU-80-000126 The vCenter Lookup service must limit the number of times that each Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection is kept alive.

Information

KeepAlive provides long lived HTTP sessions that allow multiple requests to be sent over the same connection. Enabling KeepAlive mitigates the effects of several types of denial-of-service attacks.

An advantage of KeepAlive is the reduced latency in subsequent requests (no handshaking). However, a disadvantage is that server resources are not available to handle other requests while a connection is maintained between the server and the client.

Tomcat can be configured to limit the number of subsequent requests that one client can submit to the server over an established connection. This limit helps provide a balance between the advantages of KeepAlive, while not allowing any one connection being held too long by any one client.

Solution

Navigate to and open:

/usr/lib/vmware-lookupsvc/conf/server.xml

Configure the <Connector> node with the value:

maxKeepAliveRequests='50'

Restart the service with the following command:

# vmon-cli --restart lookupsvc

See Also

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

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL

References: 800-53|AC-10, CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000054, Rule-ID|SV-259053r960735_rule, STIG-ID|VCLU-80-000126, Vuln-ID|V-259053

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 4ddba4d29b635b9a12ed1430ea79936512d0915dab8ec4689299db27eea6fce9