6.5. Additional password policy options in IdM
As an Identity Management (IdM) administrator, you can strengthen the default password requirements by enabling additional password policy options based on the libpwquality feature set. The additional password policy options include the following:
--maxrepeat- Specifies the maximum acceptable number of same consecutive characters in the new password.
--maxsequence- Specifies the maximum length of monotonic character sequences in the new password. Examples of such a sequence are 12345 or fedcb. Most such passwords will not pass the simplicity check.
--dictcheck-
If nonzero, checks whether the password, with possible modifications, matches a word in a dictionary. Currently
libpwqualityperforms the dictionary check using thecrackliblibrary. --usercheck- If nonzero, checks whether the password, with possible modifications, contains the user name in some form. It is not performed for user names shorter than 3 characters.
You cannot apply the additional password policy options to existing passwords. If you apply any of the additional options, IdM automatically sets the --minlength option, the minimum number of characters in a password, to 6 characters.
In a mixed environment with RHEL 7, RHEL 8, RHEL 9, and RHEL 10 servers, you can enforce the additional password policy settings only on servers running on RHEL 8.4 and later. If a user is logged in to an IdM client and the IdM client is communicating with an IdM server running on RHEL 8.3 or earlier, then the new password policy requirements set by the system administrator will not be applied. To ensure consistent behavior, upgrade or update all servers to RHEL 8.4 and later.