RHEL 8 must automatically lock an account until the locked account is released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur during a 15-minute time period.

Severity	Group ID	Group Title	Version	Rule ID	Date	STIG Version
medium	V-230337	SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005	RHEL-08-020015	SV-230337r1134885_rule	2025-11-24	2

Description
By limiting the number of failed logon attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-force attacks, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account. In RHEL 8.2 the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file was incorporated to centralize the configuration of the pam_faillock.so module. Also introduced is a "local_users_only" option that will only track failed user authentication attempts for local users in /etc/passwd and ignore centralized (AD, IdM, LDAP, etc.) users to allow the centralized platform to solely manage user lockout. From "faillock.conf" man pages: Note that the default directory that "pam_faillock" uses is usually cleared on system boot so the access will be reenabled after system reboot. If that is undesirable a different tally directory must be set with the "dir" option. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005, SRG-OS-000329-GPOS-00128

Description

By limiting the number of failed logon attempts, the risk of unauthorized system access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-force attacks, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account. In RHEL 8.2 the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file was incorporated to centralize the configuration of the pam_faillock.so module. Also introduced is a "local_users_only" option that will only track failed user authentication attempts for local users in /etc/passwd and ignore centralized (AD, IdM, LDAP, etc.) users to allow the centralized platform to solely manage user lockout. From "faillock.conf" man pages: Note that the default directory that "pam_faillock" uses is usually cleared on system boot so the access will be reenabled after system reboot. If that is undesirable a different tally directory must be set with the "dir" option. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005, SRG-OS-000329-GPOS-00128

ℹ️ Check
Verify the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file is configured to lock an account until released by an administrator after three unsuccessful logon attempts: $ sudo grep 'unlock_time =' /etc/security/faillock.conf unlock_time = 0 If the "unlock_time" option is not set to "0", or is missing or commented out, this is a finding.

✔️ Fix
Configure the operating system to lock an account until released by an administrator when three unsuccessful logon attempts occur in 15 minutes. Add/Modify the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file to match the following line: unlock_time = 0