O121-C2-014000 - The DBMS must support organizational requirements to prohibit password reuse for the organization-defined number of generations.

Information

Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks.

To meet password policy requirements, passwords need to be changed at specific policy-based intervals.

If the information system or application allows the user to consecutively reuse their password when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed as per policy requirements.

Password reuse restrictions protect against bypass of password expiration requirements and help protect accounts from password guessing attempts.

Note that user authentication and account management must be done via an enterprise-wide mechanism whenever possible. Examples of enterprise-level authentication/access mechanisms include, but are not limited to, Active Directory and LDAP. This requirement applies to cases where it is necessary to have accounts directly managed by Oracle.

Solution

If all user accounts are authenticated by the OS or an enterprise-level authentication/access mechanism, and not by Oracle, no fix to the DBMS is required.

If any user accounts are managed by Oracle, for each profile, set the PASSWORD_REUSE_MAX to enforce the DOD-defined minimum number of password changes before a password may be repeated (five or greater).

PASSWORD_REUSE_MAX is effective if and only if PASSWORD_REUSE_TIME is specified, so ensure also that it has a meaningful value. Since the minimum password lifetime is one day, the smallest meaningful value is the same as the PASSWORD_REUSE_MAX value.

Using PPPPPP as an example, the statement to do this is:
ALTER PROFILE PPPPPP LIMIT PASSWORD_REUSE_MAX 5 PASSWORD_REUSE_TIME 5;

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Oracle_Database_12c_V3R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION

References: 800-53|IA-5(1)(b), CAT|II, CCI|CCI-004061, Rule-ID|SV-237727r998262_rule, STIG-ID|O121-C2-014000, STIG-Legacy|SV-76211, STIG-Legacy|V-61721, Vuln-ID|V-237727

Plugin: OracleDB

Control ID: c5ef5d498eb69234454f2681397e24099506e51a002767913a5995f06991ef01