KRNL-5820 - Usage of core dumps

This information is provided as part of the Lynis community project. It is related to Lynis control KRNL-5820 and should be considered as-is and without guarantees. Any advice and commands should be tested before implementing them in production environments.

Control details
CategoryKernel
Application

Description

Lynis tests if core dumps are enabled on the system.

How to solve

Core dumps are used in troubleshooting software defects. They contain detailed information from system memory and can be very helpful to determine what happened when the specific software component crashed. At the same time, core dumps can contain very sensitive data. For that reason alone it is advised to only enable core dumps when really needed. Under normal conditions, core dumps can be disabled safely.

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About

Lynis is a technical security auditing tool for Unix flavors like Linux, macOS, AIX, Solaris, and *BSD. It is open source software and free to use. Typical usage include system hardening, compliance testing, and vulnerability scanning. The project has an active community, including development via GitHub.

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Benefits: automate security audits, detailed reporting, compliance testing.

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