The Photon operating system must prevent leaking information of the existence of a user account.

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.

If the pam_faillock.so module is not configured to use the silent flag it could leak information about the existence or nonexistence of a user account.

At the command line, run the following command to verify account information is not leaked during the login process:

# grep '^silent' /etc/security/faillock.conf

Example result:

silent

If the "silent" option is not set, is missing or commented out, this is a finding.

Note: If faillock.conf is not used to configure pam_faillock.so then these options may be specified on the faillock lines in the system-auth and system-account files.

Navigate to and open:

/etc/security/faillock.conf

Add or update the following lines:

silent

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.