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Do Not Show System Messages When Unsuccessful Logon Attempts Occur

An XCCDF Rule

Description

This rule ensures the system prevents informative messages from being presented to the user pertaining to logon information after a number of incorrect login attempts using pam_faillock.so. pam_faillock.so module requires multiple entries in pam files. These entries must be carefully defined to work as expected. In order to avoid errors when manually editing these files, it is recommended to use the appropriate tools, such as authselect or authconfig, depending on the OS version.

warning alert: Warning

If the system relies on authselect tool to manage PAM settings, the remediation will also use authselect tool. However, if any manual modification was made in PAM files, the authselect integrity check will fail and the remediation will be aborted in order to preserve intentional changes. In this case, an informative message will be shown in the remediation report. If the system supports the /etc/security/faillock.conf file, the pam_faillock parameters should be defined in faillock.conf file.

Rationale

The pam_faillock module without the silent option will leak information about the existence or non-existence of a user account in the system because the failures are not recorded for unknown users. The message about the user account being locked is never displayed for non-existing user accounts allowing the adversary to infer that a particular account exists or not on the system.

ID
xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_accounts_passwords_pam_faillock_silent
Severity
Medium
References
Updated



Remediation - Shell Script

# Remediation is applicable only in certain platforms
if rpm --quiet -q pam; then

if [ -f /usr/bin/authselect ]; then
    if ! authselect check; then
echo "

Remediation - Ansible

- name: Gather the package facts
  package_facts:
    manager: auto
  tags:
  - accounts_passwords_pam_faillock_silent
  - low_complexity