PHTN-67-000031 - The Photon operating system must enforce a minimum eight-character password length.

Information

The shorter the password, the lower the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised.

Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. Password length is one factor of several that helps to determine strength and how long it takes to crack a password. Use of more characters in a password helps to exponentially increase the time and/or resources required to compromise the password.

Solution

Open /etc/applmgmt/appliance/system-password with a text editor.

Comment out any existing 'pam_cracklib.so' line and add the following:

password requisite pam_cracklib.so dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=8 minclass=4 difok=4 retry=3 maxsequence=0 enforce_for_root

Save and close.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_VMW_vSphere_6-7_Y23M07_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION

References: 800-53|IA-5(1)(a), CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000205, Rule-ID|SV-239103r863028_rule, STIG-ID|PHTN-67-000031, Vuln-ID|V-239103

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: aa3d788e2121856a5b1f1f84333b9efbf17c2a5f4cde76833cb8292a2374f427