The NSX Distributed Firewall must generate traffic log entries that can be sent by the ESXi hosts to the central syslog.

Severity	Group ID	Group Title	Version	Rule ID	Date	STIG Version
low	V-265612	SRG-NET-000074-FW-000009	NDFW-4X-000004	SV-265612r993933_rule	2024-12-13	1

Description
Without establishing what type of event occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. Audit event content that may be necessary to satisfy this requirement includes, for example, time stamps, source and destination addresses, user/process identifiers, event descriptions, success/fail indications, filenames involved, and access control or flow control rules invoked. Associating event types with detected events in the network element logs provides a means of investigating an attack, recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or identifying an improperly configured network element. Satisfies: SRG-NET-000074-FW-000009, SRG-NET-000075-FW-000010, SRG-NET-000076-FW-000011, SRG-NET-000077-FW-000012, SRG-NET-000078-FW-000013, SRG-NET-000492-FW-000006, SRG-NET-000493-FW-000007

Description

Without establishing what type of event occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. Audit event content that may be necessary to satisfy this requirement includes, for example, time stamps, source and destination addresses, user/process identifiers, event descriptions, success/fail indications, filenames involved, and access control or flow control rules invoked. Associating event types with detected events in the network element logs provides a means of investigating an attack, recognizing resource utilization or capacity thresholds, or identifying an improperly configured network element. Satisfies: SRG-NET-000074-FW-000009, SRG-NET-000075-FW-000010, SRG-NET-000076-FW-000011, SRG-NET-000077-FW-000012, SRG-NET-000078-FW-000013, SRG-NET-000492-FW-000006, SRG-NET-000493-FW-000007

ℹ️ Check
From the NSX Manager web interface, navigate to Security >> Policy Management >> Distributed Firewall >> All Rules. For each rule, click the gear icon and verify the logging setting. If logging is not enabled for any rule, this is a finding.

✔️ Fix
From the NSX Manager web interface, navigate to Security >> Policy Management >> Distributed Firewall >> Category Specific Rules. For each rule that has logging disabled, click the gear icon, toggle the logging option to "Enable", and click "Apply". or For each Policy or Section, click the menu icon on the left and select "Enable Logging for All Rules". After all changes are made, click "Publish". NOTE: Syslog and alert monitoring procedure: Syslog configuration is in the vSphere ESXi STIG where there is a control to require syslog configuration. This is because the NSX Distributed Firewall data plane is not directly configured to communicate with the central log server/syslog. The firewall runs in a distributed manner across ESXi hosts, and the traffic logs for the DFW are located on each host for the traffic it processes and are forwarded from each host to a centralized syslog server. Thus, ESXi hosts must be configured to send the syslogs to the log server. In turn, the syslog must be configured to send all required alerts, including when unknown or out-of-order extension headers are detected in inbound and outbound IPv6 traffic.

✔️ Fix

From the NSX Manager web interface, navigate to Security >> Policy Management >> Distributed Firewall >> Category Specific Rules. For each rule that has logging disabled, click the gear icon, toggle the logging option to "Enable", and click "Apply". or For each Policy or Section, click the menu icon on the left and select "Enable Logging for All Rules". After all changes are made, click "Publish". NOTE: Syslog and alert monitoring procedure: Syslog configuration is in the vSphere ESXi STIG where there is a control to require syslog configuration. This is because the NSX Distributed Firewall data plane is not directly configured to communicate with the central log server/syslog. The firewall runs in a distributed manner across ESXi hosts, and the traffic logs for the DFW are located on each host for the traffic it processes and are forwarded from each host to a centralized syslog server. Thus, ESXi hosts must be configured to send the syslogs to the log server. In turn, the syslog must be configured to send all required alerts, including when unknown or out-of-order extension headers are detected in inbound and outbound IPv6 traffic.