Title

RHEL 9 must enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one special character be used. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

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. RHEL 9 utilizes "pwquality" as a mechanism to enforce password complexity. Note that to require special characters without degrading the "minlen" value, the credit value must be expressed as a negative number in "/etc/security/pwquality.conf".

Check Content

Verify that RHEL 9 enforces password complexity by requiring at least one special character with the following command: $ sudo grep ocredit /etc/security/pwquality.conf /etc/security/pwquality.conf.d/*.conf ocredit = -1 If the value of "ocredit" is a positive number or is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Configure RHEL 9 to enforce password complexity by requiring at least one special character be used by setting the "ocredit" option. Add the following line to "/etc/security/pwquality.conf" (or modify the line to have the required value): ocredit = -1

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-258109r926314_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-258109

Group Title: SRG-OS-000266-GPOS-00101

Expert Comments

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