Details

Information needed by an attacker to begin looking for possible vulnerabilities in a web server includes any information about the web server and plug-ins or modules being used.

When debugging or trace information is enabled in a production web server, information about the web server, such as web server type, version, patches installed, plug-ins and modules installed, type of code being used by the hosted application, and any backends being used for data storage may be displayed. Since this information may be placed in logs and general messages during normal operation of the web server, an attacker does not need to cause an error condition to gain this information.

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’

Add or set the value of ‘TraceEnable’ to ‘Off’.

Set the ‘LogLevel’ directive to ‘info’ or below.

Supportive Information

The following resource is also helpful.

• https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Apache_Server_2-4_UNIX_Y22M01_STIG.zip

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

References

• 800-53|SI-11a.
• CAT|II
• CCI|CCI-001312
• Rule-ID|SV-214257r612240_rule
• STIG-ID|AS24-U1-000630
• STIG-Legacy|SV-102789
• STIG-Legacy|V-92701
• Vuln-ID|V-214257

Source

• Tenable.com/audits