1.149 OL08-00-020023

Information

OL 8 systems, versions 8.2 and above, must include root when automatically locking an account until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur during a 15-minute time period.

GROUP ID: V-248665
RULE ID: SV-248665r958388

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 OL 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 include root when locking an account after three unsuccessful logon attempts occur in 15 minutes.

Add/modify the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file to match the following line:

even_deny_root

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/23791

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL

References: 800-53|AC-7a., 800-53|AC-7b., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000044, CCI|CCI-002238, Rule-ID|SV-248665r958388_rule, STIG-ID|OL08-00-020023, Vuln-ID|V-248665

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: f1298cd29b8b3bcea4250f3cd75142095188d03aebb387f79e9d445203d6cfb5