[Open-scap] Using authconfig rather than hand editing files

[Marek Haicman]

On 05/27/2018 08:45 PM, Dan White wrote:
>> On May 27, 2018, at 12:02 PM, Šimon Lukašík <slukasik at redhat.com 
>> <mailto:slukasik at redhat.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On 05/25/2018 11:06 PM, Dan White wrote:
>>> I just messed up a baker’s dozen of RHEL 6 virtual machines by hand 
>>> editing /etc/pam.d files system-auth-ac and password-auth-ac
>>> I was able to un-mess 8 of them with an authconfig command.
>>> The other 5 are in various stages of recovery.  One had a snapshot 
>>> but the other 4 are Oracle servers that cannot be snapshot because of 
>>> shared storage.
>>> Anyway, what I am looking for here is some brainstorming toward 
>>> implementing security settings with authconfig commands rather than 
>>> hand editing the files that utility can alter.
>>> Thanks.
>>
>> I am not sure this is right forum for this. Nevertheless, I wouldn't 
>> be surprised this brainstorming ended before it even started as You 
>> didn't provide us particular peculiarities you are faced with and thus 
>> left us with very general (and thus hard) task at hand.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> ~š.
> 
> OK, let’s start with RHEL-07-010200 - Set PAM's Password Hashing 
> Algorithm - CCE-27104-9
> 
> The Remediation shell script says:
> 
> |AUTH_FILES[0]="/etc/pam.d/system-auth" 
> AUTH_FILES[1]="/etc/pam.d/password-auth" for pamFile in 
> "${AUTH_FILES[@]}" do if ! grep -q 
> "^password.*sufficient.*pam_unix.so.*sha512" $pamFile; then sed -i 
> --follow-symlinks "/^password.*sufficient.*pam_unix.so/ s/$/ sha512/" 
> $pamFile fi done|
> 
> 
> But up at the top of both of those files it says : *"User changes will 
> be destroyed the next time authconfig is run”*
> 
> Here are more:
> 
> RHEL-07-010119 - Set Password Retry Prompts Permitted Per-Session - 
> CCE-27160-1
> RHEL-07-010270 - Limit Password Reuse - CCE-26923-3
> RHEL-07-010290 - Prevent Log In to Accounts With Empty Password - 
> CCE-27286-4
> RHEL-07-010320 - Set Deny For Failed Password Attempts - CCE-27350-8
> RHEL-07-010320 - Set Interval For Counting Failed Password Attempts - 
> CCE-27297-1
> RHEL-07-010320 - Set Lockout Time For Failed Password Attempts - CCE-26884-7
> RHEL-07-010330 - Configure the root Account for Failed Password Attempts 
> - CCE-80353-6
> 
> Every one, in so many words, directs the hand editing of 
> /etc/pam.d/system-auth(-ac) and/or /etc/pam.d/password-auth(-ac)
> 
> Hopefully, this provides sufficient "particular peculiarities"
> 
> Back to my original question: How might one use the /authconfig/ command 
> to remediate each one of those ?
> 
> How about it ?
> I will be tinkering on my own as time allows and I will gladly share 
> anything I discover.

Hello Dan,
historically, we have tried to use authconfig for some of the 
remediations (smartcards), as it was kind of obvious choice, right? 
Well, it fired back a bit, because you cannot really combine authconfig 
and manual fixes. So after you made some of the more complex fixes by 
hand (fixes that authconfig was not able to deliver) and then tried to 
fix a triviality using authconfig tool, it would revert your manual change.

One of the problems of old authconfig (got added in RHEL7.4 I think, 
RHEL6 is affected) is no support for `faillock`. So you cannot really 
fix this one. So we gave up, and reverted to fixing everything by old 
style sed-ing :(

Regards,
Marek
> _______________________________________________________
> _Dan White : d_e_white at icloud.com <mailto:d_e_white at icloud.com>_
> “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life 
> exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact 
> us.”
> Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes)