AIX must enforce a minimum 15-character password length.
An XCCDF Rule
Description
The shorter the password, the lower the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised. Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. Password length is one factor of several that helps to determine strength and how long it takes to crack a password. Use of more characters in a password helps to exponentially increase the time and/or resources required to compromise the password.
- ID
- SV-215226r1009542_rule
- Version
- AIX7-00-001129
- Severity
- High
- References
- Updated
Remediation Templates
A Manual Procedure
From the command prompt, run the following command to set "minlen=15" for the default stanza in "/etc/security/user":
# chsec -f /etc/security/user -s default -a minlen=15
For each user who has "minlen" value less than "15", set its "minlen" to "15" by running the following command from command prompt:
# chsec -f /etc/security/user -s [user_name] -a minlen=15