The Photon operating system must enforce a minimum 15-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 to verify a minimum 15-character password length:

# grep '^password.*pam_pwquality.so' /etc/pam.d/system-password

Example result:

password requisite pam_pwquality.so dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=15 difok=8 enforce_for_root dictcheck=1

If the "minlen" option is not >= 15, is missing or commented out, this is a finding.

Navigate to and open:

/etc/pam.d/system-password

Configure the pam_pwquality.so line to have the "minlen" option set to "15" as follows:

password requisite pam_pwquality.so dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=15 difok=8 enforce_for_root dictcheck=1

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.