RHEL 8 must be configured in the system-auth file to prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.
An XCCDF Rule
Description
<VulnDiscussion>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 reuse their password consecutively when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed per policy requirements. RHEL 8 uses "pwhistory" consecutively as a mechanism to prohibit password reuse. This is set in both: /etc/pam.d/password-auth /etc/pam.d/system-auth. Note that manual changes to the listed files may be overwritten by the "authselect" program.</VulnDiscussion><FalsePositives></FalsePositives><FalseNegatives></FalseNegatives><Documentable>false</Documentable><Mitigations></Mitigations><SeverityOverrideGuidance></SeverityOverrideGuidance><PotentialImpacts></PotentialImpacts><ThirdPartyTools></ThirdPartyTools><MitigationControl></MitigationControl><Responsibility></Responsibility><IAControls></IAControls>
- ID
- SV-251717r902749_rule
- Severity
- Medium
- References
- Updated
Remediation - Manual Procedure
Configure the operating system in the system-auth file to prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.
Add the following line in "/etc/pam.d/system-auth" (or modify the line to have the required value):
password requisite pam_pwhistory.so use_authtok remember=5 retry=3