UBTU-16-010230 - Passwords must be prohibited from reuse for a minimum of five generations.

Information

Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. If the information system or application allows the user to consecutively reuse their password when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed as per policy requirements.

Solution

Configure the Ubuntu operating system prevents passwords from being reused for a minimum of five generations.

Add or modify the 'remember' parameter value to the following line in '/etc/pam.d/common-password' file:

password [success=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so obscure sha512 remember=5 rounds=5000

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_CAN_Ubuntu_16-04_LTS_V2R1_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION

References: 800-53|IA-5(1), CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000200, Rule-ID|SV-214961r508033_rule, STIG-ID|UBTU-16-010230, STIG-Legacy|SV-90155, STIG-Legacy|V-75475, Vuln-ID|V-214961

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 8712b5fd8d35790ffb1dab5eb118ec59fca67c5778cfd3385cd4e5377b4bc2c0