V-248668

Discussion

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. In OL 8.2 the "/etc/security/faillock.conf" file was incorporated to centralize the configuration of the pam_faillock.so module. Also introduced is a "local_users_only" option that will only track failed user authentication attempts for local users in /etc/passwd and ignore centralized (AD, IdM, LDAP, etc.) users to allow the centralized platform to solely manage user lockout. From "faillock.conf" man pages: Note that the default directory that "pam_faillock" uses is usually cleared on system boot so the access will be reenabled after system reboot. If that is undesirable a different tally directory must be set with the "dir" option. The preauth argument must be used when the module is called before the modules that ask for user credentials, such as the password. Satisfies: SRG-OS-000021-GPOS-00005, SRG-OS-000329-GPOS-00128

Check Content

Note: This check applies to OL versions 8.2 or newer, if the system is OL version 8.0 or 8.1, this check is not applicable.

Verify the pam_faillock.so module is present in the "/etc/pam.d/password-auth" file:

$ sudo grep pam_faillock.so /etc/pam.d/password-auth

auth               required                            pam_faillock.so preauth
auth               required                            pam_faillock.so authfail
account          required                            pam_faillock.so

If the pam_faillock.so module is not present in the "/etc/pam.d/password-auth" file with the "preauth" line listed before pam_unix.so, this is a finding.