The operating system must enforce minimum password length.

From Apple OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Workstation STIG

Associated with: CCI-000205

SV-65885r1_rule The operating system must enforce minimum password length.

Vulnerability discussion

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.

Check content

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

To set the policy to force the length of a password, a configuration profile must be created and applied to the workstation.

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