6.2. What is the Password Complexity for SIMP?

The following are the default password requirements for a standard SIMP system. This is based off of an amalgam of various password policies and may vary based on individual policies that are set for your installation.

The default complexity is enforced in both PAM and LDAP, which are managed by SIMP’s modules:

Warning

If you are using the SIMP Compliance Engine to enforce a specific compliance profile, the enforced rules may be different than those shown below. Be sure to examine the profile to understand the rules applicable to your system.

6.2.1. Complexity Rules

  • 15 Characters or greater

  • 1 Upper case letter

  • 1 Lower case letter

  • 1 Number

  • 1 Special character

  • No more than 2 repetitions of the same character

    • OK: aab

    • BAD: aaa

  • No more than 3 repetitions of a character from the same character class

    • OK: abcD

    • BAD: abcd

  • No more than 4 characters in a monotonic character sequence

    • OK: 1b2c3d

    • BAD: aBcDe

    • BAD: EdCbA

  • Cannot contain your username in straight or reversed form

  • Cannot contain items from your GECOS field (usually your full name)

  • Must have more than 4 character changes from the old password

  • Must not be one of the last 24 passwords that you have used

You can check whether or not a password will meet the system requirements as follows:

  • On systems that use pam_pwquality, use the pwscore utility.

  • On systems that use pam_cracklib, use the cracklib-check utility.

Note

Locked out accounts will unlock automatically after 15 minutes for non-root users and one minute for the root user.

Important

Systems that use pam_cracklib may differ slightly in behavior from systems that use pam_pwquality. If issues are found, please file a bug with the OS vendor noting the issue.