OL08-00-020280 - All OL 8 passwords must contain at least one special character.

Information

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.

Password complexity is one factor of several that determines how long it takes to crack a password. The more complex the password, the greater the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised.

OL 8 uses 'pwquality' as a mechanism to enforce password complexity. Note that to require special characters without degrading the 'minlen' value, the credit value must be expressed as a negative number in '/etc/security/pwquality.conf'.

Solution

Configure OL 8 to enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one special character be used by setting the 'ocredit' option.

Add or update the following line in the '/etc/security/pwquality.conf' file or a configuration file in the '/etc/security/pwquality.conf.d/' directory:

ocredit = -1

Remove any configurations that conflict with the above value.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Oracle_Linux_8_V1R7_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|III, CCI|CCI-001619, Rule-ID|SV-248709r858647_rule, STIG-ID|OL08-00-020280, Vuln-ID|V-248709

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 8dc4645f3cd0716ee7c887d8a2bb267484e9d8bb0e8e4e9352b54bff76873bef