Details

Use of a complex password helps to increase the time and resources required to compromise the password. Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. ‘pwquality’ enforces complex password construction configuration and has the ability to limit brute-force attacks on the system.

Solution

Configure the operating system to use ‘pwquality’ to enforce password complexity rules.

Install the ‘pam_pwquality’ package by using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install libpam-pwquality -y

Add the following line to ‘/etc/security/pwquality.conf’ (or modify the line to have the required value):

enforcing = 1

Add the following line to ‘/etc/pam.d/common-password’ (or modify the line to have the required value):

password requisite pam_pwquality.so retry=3

Note: The value of ‘retry’ should be between ‘1’ and ‘3’.

Supportive Information

The following resource is also helpful.

• https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_CAN_Ubuntu_20-04_LTS_V1R1_STIG.zip

This security hardening control applies to the following category of controls within NIST 800-53: Configuration Management.This control applies to the following type of system Unix.

References

• 800-53|CM-6b.
• CAT|II
• CCI|CCI-000366
• Rule-ID|SV-238228r653859_rule
• STIG-ID|UBTU-20-010057
• Vuln-ID|V-238228

Source

• Tenable.com/audits