TOSS must enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one special character be used.

STIG ID: TOSS-04-040350  |  SRG: SRG-OS-000266-GPOS-00101 |  Severity: medium |  CCI: CCI-004066,CCI-001619 |  Vulnerability Id: V-253087

Vulnerability 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.

TOSS 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

Verify the value for "ocredit" in "/etc/security/pwquality.conf" with the following command:

$ sudo grep ocredit /etc/security/pwquality.conf
ocredit = -1

If the value of "ocredit" is a positive number or is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the operating system to enforce password complexity by requiring that 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