TMA-COS-6.2.8
Ensure users' home directories permissions are 750 or more restrictive
Description
While the system administrator can establish secure permissions for users' home directories, the users can easily override these. Group or world-writable user home directories may enable malicious users to steal or modify other users' data or to gain another user's system privileges.
How it is checked
Audit method: Manual review
This recommendation cannot be checked automatically. A scan lists it with these instructions when you pass --include-manual.
Run the following script and verify no results are returned: #!/bin/bash grep -E -v '^(system-halt|sync|system-shutdown)' /etc/passwd | awk -F: '($7 != "'"$(which nologin)"'" && $7 != "/bin/false") { print $1 " " $6 }' | while read user dir; do if [ ! -d "$dir" ]; then echo "The home directory ($dir) of user $user does not exist." else dirperm=$(ls -ld $dir | cut -f1 -d" ") if [ $(echo $dirperm | cut -c6) != "-" ]; then echo "Group Write permission set on the home directory ($dir) of user $user" fi if [ $(echo $dirperm | cut -c8) != "-" ]; then echo "Other Read permission set on the home directory ($dir) of user $user" fi if [ $(echo $dirperm | cut -c9) != "-" ]; then echo "Other Write permission set on the home directory ($dir) of user $user" fi if [ $(echo $dirperm | cut -c10) != "-" ]; then echo "Other Execute permission set on the home directory ($dir) of user $user" fi fi done
How it is fixed
Fix method: Guidance or infrastructure patch
Making global modifications to user home directories without alerting the user community can result in unexpected outages and unhappy users. Therefore, it is recommended that a monitoring policy be established to report user file permissions and determine the action to be taken in accordance with site policy.
Properties
- Operating systems
- Any
- Tags
- access-controlcontainer-optimized-oscos
- Reference
- CIS Google Container-Optimized OS Benchmark v1.2.0 - 6.2.8 Ensure users' home directories permissions are 750 or more restrictive