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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Security Technical Implementation Guide
SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005
RHEL 8 must include root when automatically locking an account until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur during a 15-minute time period.
RHEL 8 must include root when automatically locking an account until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur during a 15-minute time period. An XCCDF Rule
RHEL 8 must include root when automatically locking an account until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur during a 15-minute time period.
Medium Severity
<VulnDiscussion>By limiting the number of failed logon attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-force attacks, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account.
RHEL 8 can utilize the "pam_faillock.so" for this purpose. Note that manual changes to the listed files may be overwritten by the "authselect" program.
From "Pam_Faillock" man pages: Note that the default directory that "pam_faillock" uses is usually cleared on system boot so the access will be reenabled after system reboot. If that is undesirable a different tally directory must be set with the "dir" option.
In RHEL 8.2 the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file was incorporated to centralize the configuration of the pam_faillock.so module. Also introduced is a "local_users_only" option that will only track failed user authentication attempts for local users in /etc/passwd and ignore centralized (AD, IdM, LDAP, etc.) users to allow the centralized platform to solely manage user lockout.
Satisfies: SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005, SRG-OS-000329-GPOS-00128</VulnDiscussion><FalsePositives></FalsePositives><FalseNegatives></FalseNegatives><Documentable>false</Documentable><Mitigations></Mitigations><SeverityOverrideGuidance></SeverityOverrideGuidance><PotentialImpacts></PotentialImpacts><ThirdPartyTools></ThirdPartyTools><MitigationControl></MitigationControl><Responsibility></Responsibility><IAControls></IAControls>