The sys admin's daily grind: pwquality

Strong Passwords

Article from Issue 239/2020
Author(s):

Regular password changes are a thing of the past: Strong passwords for each individual service provide more protection. Charly pimped his Ubuntu accordingly with a suitable PAM module.

Changing the password regularly, about every 60 or 90 days, is now considered obsolete. It is better to use a separate strong password for each service and each login. The requirement for how strong (i.e., how complicated) a password must be is something that – at least on your own systems – you can define yourself.

On my test machine with Ubuntu, I can use almost any simple password I want – that has to change. To make sure it does, I first have to install the pwquality PAM library:

$ sudo apt install libpam-pwquality

[...]

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