RHEL-08-020015 - RHEL 8 must automatically lock an account until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur during a 15-minute time period. - unlock_time

Information

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

In RHEL 8.2 the '/etc/security/faillock.conf' file was incorporated to centralize the configuration of the pam_faillock.so module. Also introduced is a 'local_users_only' option that will only track failed user authentication attempts for local users in /etc/passwd and ignore centralized (AD, IdM, LDAP, etc.) users to allow the centralized platform to solely manage user lockout.

From 'faillock.conf' man pages: Note that the default directory that 'pam_faillock' uses is usually cleared on system boot so the access will be reenabled after system reboot. If that is undesirable a different tally directory must be set with the 'dir' option.

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

Solution

Configure the operating system to lock an account until released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur in 15 minutes.

Add/Modify the appropriate sections 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
auth required pam_faillock.so authfail
account required pam_faillock.so

Add/Modify the '/etc/security/faillock.conf' file to match the following line:

unlock_time = 0

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_RHEL_8_V1R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000044, Rule-ID|SV-230337r599832_rule, STIG-ID|RHEL-08-020015, Vuln-ID|V-230337

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 83e3df34a4570d1a44fbaa4c3484aa7b462b8876d47ba571c9df5e296636fb4e