RHEL-08-020280 - All RHEL 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.

RHEL 8 utilizes '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 the operating system to enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one special character be used by setting the 'ocredit' option.

Add the following line to /etc/security/pwquality.conf (or modify the line to have the required value):

ocredit = -1

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_RHEL_8_V1R7_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|II, CCI|CCI-001619, Rule-ID|SV-230375r833329_rule, STIG-ID|RHEL-08-020280, Vuln-ID|V-230375

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 3c52b1a551e7c75be9ad1ac6c98fd681a59052842131b8a0a0881fa23fd3fc17