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

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 result is a password that is not changed per policy requirements.

At the command line, run the following command:

# grep pam_pwhistory /etc/pam.d/system-password|grep --color=always "remember=."

Expected result:

password requisite pam_pwhistory.so enforce_for_root use_authtok remember=5 retry=3

If the output does not include the "remember=5" setting as shown in the expected result, this is a finding.

Navigate to and open:

/etc/pam.d/system-password

Add the following line after the "password requisite pam_cracklib.so" statement:

password requisite pam_pwhistory.so enforce_for_root use_authtok remember=5 retry=3

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.