STIGUI
V-253060CAT II — Medium severitySV-253060r1016310_rule

TOSS must enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one uppercase character be used.

Rule version TOSS-04-040050 · STIG v2 · 2026-08-20

Discussion

Use of a complex password helps to increase the time and resources required to compromise the password. Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks.

Password complexity is one factor of several that determines how long it takes to crack a password. The more complex the password, the greater the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised.

TOSS utilizes "pwquality" as a mechanism to enforce password complexity. Note that in order to require uppercase characters, without degrading the "minlen" value, the credit value must be expressed as a negative number in "/etc/security/pwquality.conf."

Check

Verify the value for "ucredit" in "/etc/security/pwquality.conf" with the following command:

$ sudo grep ucredit /etc/security/pwquality.conf ucredit = -1

If the value of "ucredit" is a positive number or is commented out, this is a finding.

Fix

Configure the operating system to enforce password complexity by requiring that at least one uppercase character be used by setting the "ucredit" option.

Add the following line to /etc/security/pwquality.conf (or modify the line to have the required value):

ucredit = -1

Identifiers

Group ID
V-253060
Group title
SRG-OS-000069-GPOS-00037
Rule ID
SV-253060r1016310_rule
Check ID
C-56513r824850_chk
Fix ID
F-56463r824851_fix