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.

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 '/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_V2R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL

References: 800-53|AC-7a., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000044, Rule-ID|SV-230337r1017149_rule, STIG-ID|RHEL-08-020015, Vuln-ID|V-230337

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 3d0ba015bdf37dc711777eb29ca5dd32bf515d1390702b6f95ea4969987c61af