securetty and hypervisor virtual consoles (hvc)

[Albrecht, Thomas C]

All,

I'm having trouble determining whether to send these questions to this list or the gov-sec list.  If anyone has advice, please share it with me.

That said, I'm working on updating my lockdown scripts for  RHEL7 to meet the spirit of the law manifested in the RHEL6 STIG.  One of the requirements in the RHEL6 STIG is that "The system must prevent the root account from logging in from virtual consoles." (Rule ID:  SV-50293r1_rule)

Their solution is to remove all lines that start with "vc" from /etc/securetty.  RHEL7 has introduced their hypervisor virtual consoles as "hvc".  Not being as familiar with the hypervisor technology as I probably should be, is there a consensus for whether the requirement necessitates removing those lines from securetty as well?

Thanks!

Tom Albrecht

--
Tom Albrecht III, CISSP-ISSEP, GPEN
Information Assurance Engineer Staff
Cyber & Security Solutions Team (CaS2T)
Lockheed Martin Corporation, IS&GS
[e-mail]
(m) 484-798-0109
(w) 610-354-7424

securetty and hypervisor virtual consoles (hvc) (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Conley, Matthew M CTR USARMY HRC (US)]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: FOUO

Yeah, you've got me on that. I can make a test vm of the rhel7 and see if
that will block or cause issues. 
My scripts just do 'sed -I 's@^vc@@g' /etc/securetty
So that wouldn't affect that. Interesting. Will check that out.

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail]
[mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
Albrecht, Thomas C
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 9:28 AM
To: '[e-mail]'
Subject: securetty and hypervisor virtual consoles (hvc)

All,

I'm having trouble determining whether to send these questions to this list
or the gov-sec list.  If anyone has advice, please share it with me.

That said, I'm working on updating my lockdown scripts for  RHEL7 to meet
the spirit of the law manifested in the RHEL6 STIG.  One of the requirements
in the RHEL6 STIG is that "The system must prevent the root account from
logging in from virtual consoles." (Rule ID:  SV-50293r1_rule)

Their solution is to remove all lines that start with "vc" from
/etc/securetty.  RHEL7 has introduced their hypervisor virtual consoles as
"hvc".  Not being as familiar with the hypervisor technology as I probably
should be, is there a consensus for whether the requirement necessitates
removing those lines from securetty as well?

Thanks!

Tom Albrecht