Password rules not effective


 
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# 1  
Old 11-07-2012
Network Password rules not effective

I was looking for a good list of words to exclude people from using as passwords, i.e. those that could be guessed easily. I'm working through a whole bunch of suggestions from skullsecurity.org, but I managed to find this page that seems to suggest I have more options than I thought. Smilie

I have a server built at AIX 6.1.3.0, but recently brought up to AIX 6.1.7.5, so I think I qualify, but there have been no changes to /etc/security/user by the update. Smilie

Adding a record in the default: stanza for minloweralpha has no effect. Smilie Back on quest for a dictionary list, the suggestions on the document are shown for excluding the sequence "123" from a user selected password, but I can't get that to work either. Does anyone have it working and can point out why I am being a fool? Smilie

My personal stanza in /etc/security/user has a dictionlist definition and I can prove that it is effective for excluding specific words, such as password but I'd prefer to craft some woolly rules to exclude our usual suspects like "July2012" etc.

Am I just missing something obvious? I have just installed bos.data from the original media, which has given me a /usr/share/dict/words file full of all sorts of stuff, but they are all explicit exclusions and I still can't get either of the above to work. Smilie

..... and why does : wall : appear as a question box now?



Many apologies and thanks, in advance,

Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

Last edited by rbatte1; 11-08-2012 at 08:41 AM..
# 2  
Old 11-12-2012
With all the languages of the world, dictionary tests are bad. Some sort of checksum history can keep them off the last N passwords. Make a rule that every password has to have both upper and lower case, a number and a special, with no more than 3 of anything in a row, so Hello1! amd HELLo1! are not legal, but heLLo1! is OK. The breaks up phone numbers, anniversaries (the most popular?), words, names, etc.
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