TMA-COCKROACHDB-2.3
Do Not Grant Sudo Privileges to the CockroachDB Process User
Description
CockroachDB should run under a dedicated, non-root operating system account that has only the permissions required to read and write CockroachDB's data, log, and certificate directories. This dedicated service user (commonly cockroach) must not be granted sudo privileges or be included in any privileged system groups (such as wheel, sudo, or adm). The benchmark rates this recommendation Manual; the automated check covers its objective pass criterion. Passes when every cockroach start process runs as a non-root user that is not in the sudo, wheel, admin or root groups. Also review /etc/sudoers and /etc/sudoers.d for entries naming the cockroach user.
How it is checked
Audit method: Shell command
out=$(ps -eo user=,args= | grep '[c]ockroach start') || exit 1; bad=0; for u in $(printf '%s\n' "$out" | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u); do [ "$u" = root ] && bad=1; if id -nG "$u" 2>/dev/null | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -qxE 'sudo|wheel|admin|root'; then bad=1; fi; done; [ $bad -eq 0 ] && echo compliant || echo privileged- Expected output
compliant
How it is fixed
Fix method: Guidance or infrastructure patch
Run CockroachDB as a dedicated non-privileged 'cockroach' user (User=cockroach in the unit), remove it from sudo/wheel groups (gpasswd -d cockroach wheel) and delete any sudoers entries for it.
Properties
- Operating systems
- Any
- Tags
- cockroachdbservice-account
- Reference
- CIS CockroachDB v25.x Benchmark v1.0.0 - 2.3 Do Not Grant Sudo Privileges to the CockroachDB Process User
Check this host
Run this on a machine you are allowed to audit. The scan is read-only.
tmaegis scan --target cockroachdb