The operating system must enforce minimum password length.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-51675	OSX8-00-00590	SV-65885r1_rule		Medium

Description
Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting guessing and brute-force attacks. Password length is one factor of several that helps to determine strength and how long it takes to crack a password. The shorter the password is, the lower the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised. Use of more characters in a password helps to exponentially increase the time and/or resources required to compromise the password.

Description

Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting guessing and brute-force attacks. Password length is one factor of several that helps to determine strength and how long it takes to crack a password. The shorter the password is, the lower the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised. Use of more characters in a password helps to exponentially increase the time and/or resources required to compromise the password.

STIG	Date
Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Workstation STIG	2015-02-10

Details

Check Text ( C-53977r1_chk )
To check the currently applied policies for password and accounts, use the following command: sudo system_profiler SPConfigurationProfileDataType \| grep minLength The parameter minLength should be "15". If it is less than "15", this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-56473r1_fix)
To set the policy to force the length of a password, a configuration profile must be created and applied to the workstation.