RHEL-07-010330 - The Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system must lock the associated account after three unsuccessful root logon attempts are made within a 15-minute period.

Information

By limiting the number of failed logon attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute forcing, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account.

Satisfies: SRG-OS-000329-GPOS-00128, SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005

Solution

Configure the operating system to automatically lock the root account, for a minimum of 15 minutes, when three unsuccessful logon attempts in 15 minutes are made.

Modify the first three lines of the auth section and the first line of the account section of the '/etc/pam.d/system-auth' and '/etc/pam.d/password-auth' files to match the following lines:

auth required pam_faillock.so preauth silent audit deny=3 even_deny_root fail_interval=900 unlock_time=900
auth sufficient pam_unix.so try_first_pass
auth [default=die] pam_faillock.so authfail audit deny=3 even_deny_root fail_interval=900 unlock_time=900
account required pam_faillock.so

Note: Per requirement RHEL-07-010199, RHEL 7 must be configured to not overwrite custom authentication configuration settings while using the authconfig utility, otherwise manual changes to the listed files will be overwritten whenever the authconfig utility is used.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_RHEL_7_V3R15_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL

References: 800-53|AC-7b., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-002238, Rule-ID|SV-204428r958736_rule, STIG-ID|RHEL-07-010330, STIG-Legacy|SV-86569, STIG-Legacy|V-71945, Vuln-ID|V-204428

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 8063ab31ab2ebd226b6aeb79ad59f66bd04333deffe52b70ddd5b9411f8ac1c0