The SLES for vRealize must prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.

From VMware vRealize Automation 7.x SLES Security Technical Implementation Guide

Associated with: CCI-000200

SV-100235r1_rule The SLES for vRealize must prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.

Vulnerability discussion

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.

Check content

Verify that the SLES for vRealize prohibits the reuse of a password for a minimum of five generations by running the following commands: # grep pam_pwhistory.so /etc/pam.d/common-password-vmware.local If the "remember" option in /etc/pam.d/common-password-vmware.local is not "5" or greater, this is a finding.

Fix text

Configure pam to use password history. If "remember" was not set at all in /etc/pam.d/common-password-vmware.local, run the following command: # sed -i '/pam_cracklib.so/ s/$/ remember=5/' /etc/pam.d/common-password-vmware.local If "remember" was set incorrectly, run the following command to set it to "5": # sed -i '/pam_cracklib.so/ s/remember=./remember=5/' /etc/pam.d/common-password-vmware.local

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