The Photon operating system must prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.
Severity | Group ID | Group Title | Version | Rule ID | Date | STIG Version |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| medium | V-258822 | SRG-OS-000077-GPOS-00045 | PHTN-40-000043 | SV-258822r1003637_rule | 2024-07-11 | 2 |
| Description |
|---|
| 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 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. |
| ℹ️ Check |
|---|
| At the command line, run the following commands to verify passwords are not reused for a minimum of five generations: # grep '^password.*pam_pwhistory.so' /etc/pam.d/system-password Example result: password required pam_pwhistory.so remember=5 retry=3 enforce_for_root use_authtok If the "remember" option is not set to "5" or greater, this is a finding. |
| ✔️ Fix |
|---|
| Navigate to and open: /etc/pam.d/system-password Configure the pam_pwhistory.so line to have the "remember" option set to 5 or greater as follows: password required pam_pwhistory.so remember=5 retry=3 enforce_for_root use_authtok 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. |