RHEL 9 must enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one special character be used.
An XCCDF Rule
Description
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. Password complexity is one factor of several that determines how long it takes to crack a password. The more complex the password, the greater the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised. RHEL 9 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".
- ID
- SV-258109r1045220_rule
- Version
- RHEL-09-611100
- Severity
- Medium
- References
- Updated
Remediation Templates
A Manual Procedure
Configure RHEL 9 to enforce password complexity by requiring at least one special character be used by setting the "ocredit" option.
Add or update the following line in the "/etc/security/pwquality.conf" file or a configuration file in the "/etc/security/pwquality.conf.d/" directory to contain the "ocredit" parameter:
ocredit = -1