AIX7-00-001129 - AIX must enforce a minimum 15-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

From the command prompt, run the following command to set 'minlen=15' for the default stanza in '/etc/security/user':
# chsec -f /etc/security/user -s default -a minlen=15

For each user who has 'minlen' value less than '15', set its 'minlen' to '15' by running the following command from command prompt:
# chsec -f /etc/security/user -s [user_name] -a minlen=15

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_IBM_AIX_7-x_V2R9_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION

References: 800-53|IA-5(1)(a), CAT|I, CCI|CCI-000205, Rule-ID|SV-215226r508663_rule, STIG-ID|AIX7-00-001129, STIG-Legacy|SV-101415, STIG-Legacy|V-91317, Vuln-ID|V-215226

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: d493e013a32eedbd0a4e3508838eda79dc13cbb8148c49f46d27bac58d3add17