The system must reject session authentication after three consecutive failed authentication attempts.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
RHEL-06-000055	RHEL-06-000055	RHEL-06-000055_rule		Low

Description
Setting the password retry prompts that are permitted on a per-session basis to a low value requires some software, such as SSH, to re-connect. This can slow down and draw additional attention to some types of password-guessing attacks. Note that this is different from account lockout, which is provided by the pam_faillock module.

STIG	Date
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide	2013-02-05

Details

Check Text ( C-RHEL-06-000055_chk )
To check how many retry attempts are permitted on a per-session basis, run the following command: $ grep pam_cracklib /etc/pam.d/system-auth The "retry" parameter will indicate how many attempts are permitted. The DoD required value is 3. This would appear as "retry=3". If it is not the required value, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-RHEL-06-000055_fix)
To configure the number of retry prompts that are permitted per-session: Edit the "pam_cracklib.so" statement in "/etc/pam.d/system-auth" to show "retry=3". The DoD requirement is 3 prompts per session.