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 9 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 RHEL 9 to enforce password complexity by requiring 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