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  4. AS24-U1-000520 – The Apache web server must generate a session ID using as much of the character set as possible to reduce the risk of brute force.

AS24-U1-000520 – The Apache web server must generate a session ID using as much of the character set as possible to reduce the risk of brute force.

Details

Generating a session identifier (ID) that is not easily guessed through brute force is essential to deter several types of session attacks. By knowing the session ID, an attacker can hijack a user session that has already been user-authenticated by the hosted application. The attacker does not need to guess user identifiers and passwords or have a secure token since the user session has already been authenticated.

By generating session IDs that contain as much of the character set as possible, i.e., A-Z, a-z, and 0-9, the session ID becomes exponentially harder to guess.

Satisfies: SRG-APP-000223-WSR-000145, SRG-APP-000224-WSR-000135, SRG-APP-000224-WSR-000136, SRG-APP-000224-WSR-000138

Solution

Determine the location of the ‘HTTPD_ROOT’ directory and the ‘httpd.conf’ file:

# httpd -V | egrep -i ‘httpd_root|server_config_file’
-D HTTPD_ROOT=’/etc/httpd’
-D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE=’conf/httpd.conf’

Load the ‘unique_id_module’.

Example: LoadModule unique_id_module modules/mod_unique_id.so

Restart Apache: apachectl restart

Supportive Information

The following resource is also helpful.

This security hardening control applies to the following category of controls within NIST 800-53: System and Communications Protection.This control applies to the following type of system Unix.

References

Source

Updated on July 16, 2022
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