The Photon operating system must prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-258822	PHTN-40-000043	SV-258822r933527_rule		Medium

Description
Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. If the information system or application allows the user to consecutively reuse their password when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed as per policy requirements.

STIG	Date
VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Appliance Photon OS 4.0 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2023-10-29

Details

Check Text ( C-62562r933525_chk )
At the command line, run the following commands to verify passwords are not reused for a minimum of five generations: # grep '^password.*pam_pwhistory.so' /etc/pam.d/system-password Example result: password required pam_pwhistory.so remember=5 retry=3 enforce_for_root use_authtok If the "remember" option is not set to "5" or greater, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-62471r933526_fix)
Navigate to and open: /etc/pam.d/system-password Configure the pam_pwhistory.so line to have the "remember" option set to 5 or greater as follows: password required pam_pwhistory.so remember=5 retry=3 enforce_for_root use_authtok Note: On vCenter appliances, the equivalent file must be edited under "/etc/applmgmt/appliance", if one exists, for the changes to persist after a reboot.