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  4. RHEL-07-010119 – The Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system must be configured so that when passwords are changed or new passwords are established, pwquality must be used.
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RHEL-07-010119 – The Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system must be configured so that when passwords are changed or new passwords are established, pwquality must be used.

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.

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

password required pam_pwquality.so retry=3

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

Supportive Information

The following resource is also helpful.

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

References

Source

Updated on July 16, 2022
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