PHTN-40-000043 The Photon operating system must prohibit password 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

Navigate to and open:

/etc/pam.d/system-password

Configure the pam_pwhistory.so line to have the "remember" option set to 5 or greater as follows:

password required pam_pwhistory.so remember=5 retry=3 enforce_for_root use_authtok

Note: On vCenter appliances, the equivalent file must be edited under "/etc/applmgmt/appliance", if one exists, for the changes to persist after a reboot.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_VMW_vSphere_8-0_Y24M08_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION

References: 800-53|IA-5(1)(b), CAT|II, CCI|CCI-004061, Rule-ID|SV-258822r1003637_rule, STIG-ID|PHTN-40-000043, Vuln-ID|V-258822

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: c47e36aa7b4d4185ea44c3a1ef55df09af854f231a5affcc4f8c30c560861ac2