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 include root when locking an account after 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:
even_deny_root