On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 10:17:07 AM Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
> There should be no check of login.defs for minlen.
Maybe this misunderstanding sources from RHEL-5 USGCB content? Having look
at relevant kickstart:
http://usgcb.nist.gov/usgcb/content/configuration/workstation-ks.cfg
suggests:
..
# CCE-4154-1 (Row 69)
sed -i "/PASS_MIN_LEN/s/[0-9]/12/" /etc/login.defs
..
That CCE has 3 parts, login.defs, passwdqc, and cracklib. The cracklib
settings is done a couple lines later in the same spec file. We assumed that no
one is using passwdqc.
The particular CCE (CCE-4154-1) is then implemented as follows
(checking
both the login.defs & also the /etc/pam.d/system-auth part):
http://ovaldb.altx-soft.ru/Definition.aspx?id=oval:gov.nist.usgcb.rhel:def
:20071
That form is included in USGCB content currently.
Is it possible that on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 the minimum password
length requirement for the system was ensured via /etc/login.defs means
(thus via shadow-utils, and that's why there's that bit in aforementioned
kickstart)?
No.
But from that time things changed, thus in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
the
way how to enforce minimum length requirement for user's password on the
system has changed. More exactly from that time PAM has become centre of
mass (IOW should be used as primary mechanism for user password
requirements management) and therefore in RHEL-6 now there should be check
for minlen in /etc/pam.d/system-auth and no check via /etc/login.defs?
> You also have to
> understand, there has been no engineering check of the validity of SSG
> settings from top to bottom to compare against what we _designed_ as the
> lockdown settings for common criteria.
Meaning there hasn't been (so far) engineering check / comparison if the
actual SSG content corresponds to the requirements as specified in Common
Criteria specification?
Sort of. That and a correctness check. Not correctness of OVAL/XCCDF, but
correctness as in changing the right settings and making sure that all of the
right settings are included.
Who should perform such a comparison? (once we know this we can
schedule
a correction)
That has been the Security Technologies Team. There is some RHEL5 USGCB work
that is needed and then I think we can turn attention to this.
-Steve