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PHTN-40-000044 - The Photon operating system 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

Navigate to and open:

/etc/pam.d/system-password

Configure the pam_pwquality.so line to have the "minlen" option set to "15" 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

Category: IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHENTICATION

References: 800-53|IA-5(1)(a), CAT|II, CCI|CCI-004066, Rule-ID|SV-258823r1003638_rule, STIG-ID|PHTN-40-000044, Vuln-ID|V-258823

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: e54d38b73a6236eeb991f90a55169592734553abab3cc9d281c79b4ad430b49a