Splunk Enterprise must be configured to prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.

Severity	Group ID	Group Title	Version	Rule ID	Date	STIG Version
low	V-251688	SRG-APP-000165-AU-002580	SPLK-CL-000410	SV-251688r1015267_rule	2025-03-05	2

Description
Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. To meet password policy requirements, passwords need to be changed at specific policy-based intervals. If the information system or application allows the user to consecutively reuse their password when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed as per policy requirements. In most enterprise environments, this requirement is usually mitigated by a properly configured external authentication system, like LDAP. Splunk local authentication takes precedence over other forms of authentication, and cannot be disabled. The mitigation settings in this requirement apply in the event a local account is created.

Description

Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. To meet password policy requirements, passwords need to be changed at specific policy-based intervals. If the information system or application allows the user to consecutively reuse their password when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed as per policy requirements. In most enterprise environments, this requirement is usually mitigated by a properly configured external authentication system, like LDAP. Splunk local authentication takes precedence over other forms of authentication, and cannot be disabled. The mitigation settings in this requirement apply in the event a local account is created.

ℹ️ Check
Examine the configuration. Navigate to the $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local/ directory. View the authentication.conf file. If the authentication.conf file does not exist, this is a finding. If the "enablePasswordHistory" is missing or is configured to False, this is a finding. If the "passwordHistoryCount" is missing or is configured to 4 or less, this is a finding.

✔️ Fix
If the authentication.conf file does not exist, copy the file from $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/default to the $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local directory. Modify the following lines in the authentication.conf file under the [splunk_auth]: enablePasswordHistory = True passwordHistoryCount = 5