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PHTN-40-000037 - The Photon operating system must enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one numeric character be used.

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This audit has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.

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Information

Use of a complex password helps to increase the time and resources required to compromise the password. Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks.

Password complexity is one factor of several that determines how long it takes to crack a password. The more complex the password, the greater the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised.

Solution

Navigate to and open:

/etc/pam.d/system-password

Configure the pam_pwquality.so line to have the "dcredit" option set to "-1" as follows:

password requisite pam_pwquality.so dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=15 difok=8 enforce_for_root dictcheck=1

Note: On vCenter appliances, the equivalent file must be edited under "/etc/applmgmt/appliance", if one exists, for the changes to persist after a reboot.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_VMW_vSphere_8-0_Y24M08_STIG.zip

Item Details

References: CAT|II, CCI|CCI-004066, Rule-ID|SV-258816r1003631_rule, STIG-ID|PHTN-40-000037, Vuln-ID|V-258816

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 7e2847b6625f939106ce9b22eab534d794a56a3b2f7f7b1100c723518f9004b5