SLES-12-010250 - The SUSE operating system must employ passwords with a minimum of 15 characters.

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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 determine strength and how long it takes to crack a password. Use of more characters in a password helps exponentially increase the time and/or resources required to compromise the password.

Solution

Configure the SUSE operating system to enforce a minimum 15-character password length.

Edit '/etc/pam.d/common-password' and edit the line containing 'pam_cracklib.so' to contain the option 'minlen=15' after the third column.

The DoD standard requires a minimum 15-character password length.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_SLES_12_V2R7_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000205, Rule-ID|SV-217127r603262_rule, STIG-ID|SLES-12-010250, STIG-Legacy|SV-91805, STIG-Legacy|V-77109, Vuln-ID|V-217127

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: e06ceb8eeb9f71f387760b95290fc9f0b5406d4fe22582152612afcbe3c66514