OL08-00-020221 - OL 8 must be configured in the system-auth file to prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.

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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 reuse their password consecutively when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed per policy requirements.

OL 8 utilizes 'pwhistory' consecutively as a mechanism to prohibit password reuse. This is set in both:
/etc/pam.d/password-auth
/etc/pam.d/system-auth

Note that manual changes to the listed files may be overwritten by the 'authselect' program.

Solution

Configure the operating system in the system-auth file to prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.

Add the following line in '/etc/pam.d/system-auth' (or modify the line to have the required value):

password requisite pam_pwhistory.so use_authtok remember=5 retry=3

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_Oracle_Linux_8_V1R8_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000200, Rule-ID|SV-252661r902824_rule, STIG-ID|OL08-00-020221, Vuln-ID|V-252661

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 37ffe5e8a7d94c35b24a7aafe0738852e97806e5ddb9063a24417d698d0ebaa7