1.140 OL08-00-020014

Information

OL 8 systems below version 8.2 must automatically lock 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-248656
RULE ID: SV-248656r958388

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.

OL 8 can use the "pam_faillock.so" for this purpose. Note that manual changes to the listed files may be overwritten by the "authselect" program.

From "Pam_Faillock" 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 lock an account until released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur in 15 minutes.

Add/modify the appropriate sections of the "/etc/pam.d/system-auth" and "/etc/pam.d/password-auth" files to match the following lines:

auth required pam_faillock.so preauth dir=/var/log/faillock silent audit deny=3 even_deny_root fail_interval=900 unlock_time=0 auth required pam_faillock.so authfail dir=/var/log/faillock unlock_time=0 account required pam_faillock.so

The "sssd" service must be restarted for the changes to take effect. To restart the "sssd" service, run the following command:

$ sudo systemctl restart sssd.service

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-248656r958388_rule, STIG-ID|OL08-00-020014, Vuln-ID|V-248656

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 3636b14d9b715c9529156ab1042013e2ff40525438655ac9e95659659b45b2fd