The system must disable accounts after three consecutive unsuccessful login attempts.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-766	GEN000460	SV-37203r1_rule	ECLO-1 ECLO-2	Medium

Description
Disabling accounts after a limited number of unsuccessful login attempts improves protection against password guessing attacks.

STIG	Date
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2013-07-03

Details

Check Text ( C-35895r1_chk )
Check the pam_tally configuration. # more /etc/pam.d/system-auth Confirm the following line is configured, before any "auth sufficient" lines: auth required pam_tally2.so deny=3 If no such line is found, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-31153r1_fix)
By default link /etc/pam.d/system-auth points to /etc/pam.d/system-auth-ac which is the file maintained by the authconfig utility. In order to add pam options other than those available via the utility create /etc/pam.d/system-auth-local with the options and including system-auth-ac. In order to set the account lockout to three failed attempts the content should be similar to: auth required pam_access.so auth required pam_tally2.so deny=3 auth include system-auth-ac account required pam_tally2.so account include system-auth-ac password include system-auth-ac session include system-auth-ac Once system-auth-local is written reset the /etc/pam.d/system-auth to point to system-auth-local. This is necessary because authconfig writes directly to system-auth-ac so any changes made by hand will be lost if authconfig is run.

Fix Text (F-31153r1_fix)

By default link /etc/pam.d/system-auth points to /etc/pam.d/system-auth-ac which is the file maintained by the authconfig utility. In order to add pam options other than those available via the utility create /etc/pam.d/system-auth-local with the options and including system-auth-ac. In order to set the account lockout to three failed attempts the content should be similar to:

auth required pam_access.so
auth required pam_tally2.so deny=3
auth include system-auth-ac
account required pam_tally2.so
account include system-auth-ac
password include system-auth-ac
session include system-auth-ac

Once system-auth-local is written reset the /etc/pam.d/system-auth to point to system-auth-local. This is necessary because authconfig writes directly to system-auth-ac so any changes made by hand will be lost if authconfig is run.