The Photon operating system must enforce a minimum eight-character password length.

The shorter the password, the lower the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised.

Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at 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. Use of more characters in a password helps to exponentially increase the time and/or resources required to compromise the password.

At the command line, run the following command:

# grep pam_cracklib /etc/pam.d/system-password|grep --color=always "minlen=.."

Example result:

password requisite pam_cracklib.so dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=8 minclass=4 difok=4 retry=3 maxsequence=0 enforce_for_root

If the output does not include minlen >= 8, this is a finding.

Navigate to and open:

/etc/pam.d/system-password

Add the following, replacing any existing "pam_cracklib.so" line:

password requisite pam_cracklib.so dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=8 minclass=4 difok=4 retry=3 maxsequence=0 enforce_for_root

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.