Vulnerability Discussion

Enforcing a minimum password lifetime helps to prevent repeated password changes to defeat the password reuse or history enforcement requirement. If users are allowed to immediately and continually change their password, then the password could be repeatedly changed in a short period of time to defeat the organization's policy regarding password reuse.

Checking existing users have this setting will ensure that no users created before the policy was configured can evade the password minimum setting.

Check

Verify the minimum time period between password changes for all user accounts is a day or more by running the following command:

$ awk -F: '$4 < 1 {print $1 " " $4}' /etc/shadow

If any results are returned that are not associated with a system account, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure noncompliant accounts to enforce a 24 hours/one day minimum password lifetime using the following command, substituting in the username:

$ chage -m 1 [user]