The operating system must prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-58493	AOSX-09-002090	SV-72923r1_rule		Medium

Description
Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks. If the information system or application allows the user to consecutively reuse their password when that password has exceeded its defined lifetime, the end result is a password that is not changed as per policy requirements.

STIG	Date
Apple OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) Workstation Security Technical Implementation Guide	2017-01-05

Details

Check Text ( C-59343r1_chk )
To check if the password policy is configured to prevent users from reusing one of their five previously used passwords, run the following command: sudo pwpolicy getglobalpolicy | tr ' ' '\n' | grep usingHistory If the result is not 'usingHistory=5', and password policy is not controlled by a directory server, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-63831r1_fix)
To set the password policy, run the following command: sudo pwpolicy setglobalpolicy 'usingHistory=5'