On Thursday, March 20, 2014 07:28:34 AM Trey Henefield wrote:
Nobody has seemed to respond to this. But this is an issue.
In /etc/login.defs, I have PASS_MIN_LEN set to 14, yet as a user, I can set
the following password 56tyghbn%^TY which only has 12 characters via the
passwd command.
In our common criteria setup, we have annotated the login.defs file with the following:
# The evaluated configuration constraints are:
# PASS_MAX_DAYS MAY be changed, must be <= 60
# PASS_MAX_DAYS MAY be changed, 0 < PASS_MIN_DAYS < PASS_MAX_DAYS
# PASS_MIN_LEN has no effect in the evaluated configuration
# PASS_WARN_AGE MAY be changed
Note...has no effect...
The intended way can be seen in system-auth:
password requisite pam_cracklib.so try_first_pass retry=3 type=
password sufficient pam_unix.so sha512 shadow nullok try_first_pass use_authtok
password required pam_deny.so
Of these, cracklib is responsible for enforcing password policy. Checking its
man page, it has something called minlen. Looking at the RHEL5 USGCB
settings, this is in fact how it's set:
sed -i "/pam_cracklib.so/s/retry=3/retry=3 minlen=12 dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 ocredit=-1
lcredit=-1 difok=3/" /etc/pam.d/system-auth
So, to have 14, alter the above settings to correct it.
-Steve