RHEL-08-020014 - 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 - preauth

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.

RHEL 8 can utilize the 'pam_faillock.so' for this purpose. Note that manual changes to the listed files may be overwritten by the 'authselect' program.

From 'Pam_Faillock' 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 dir=/var/log/faillock silent audit deny=3 even_deny_root fail_interval=900 unlock_time=0
auth required pam_faillock.so authfail dir=/var/log/faillock unlock_time=0
account required pam_faillock.so

The 'sssd' service must be restarted for the changes to take effect. To restart the 'sssd' service, run the following command:

$ sudo systemctl restart sssd.service

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_RHEL_8_V1R6_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000044, Rule-ID|SV-230336r627750_rule, STIG-ID|RHEL-08-020014, Vuln-ID|V-230336

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 908decb7b3e2deb098decb9bd9a005f47b33b98e337317b6df9539a46e41b237