OL6-00-000299 - The system must require passwords to contain no more than three consecutive repeating characters - system-auth

Information

Passwords with excessive repeating characters may be more vulnerable to password-guessing attacks.

Solution

The pam_cracklib module's 'maxrepeat' parameter controls requirements for consecutive repeating characters. When set to a positive number, it will reject passwords that contain more than the number of consecutive characters.

Edit /etc/pam.d/system-auth and /etc/pam.d/password-auth adding 'maxrepeat=3' after pam_cracklib.so to prevent a run of (3 + 1) or more identical characters.
password required pam_cracklib.so maxrepeat=3

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Oracle_Linux_6_V2R7_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-6b., CAT|III, CCI|CCI-000366, Rule-ID|SV-209029r793750_rule, STIG-ID|OL6-00-000299, STIG-Legacy|SV-65201, STIG-Legacy|V-50995, Vuln-ID|V-209029

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 27abc2d1e64fbc5a2c796ad815f3138e32428b0c5adc43a128305e0523d6bc05