PWQUALITY.CONF(5)

NAME
pwquality.conf - configuration for the libpwquality library

SYNOPSIS
/etc/security/pwquality.conf

/etc/security/pwquality.conf.d/*.conf

DESCRIPTION
pwquality.conf provides a way to configure the default password quality requirements for the system passwords. This file is read by the libpwquality library and utilities that use this library for checking and generating passwords.

The file has a very simple name = value format with possible comments starting with "#" character. The whitespace at the beginning of line, end of line, and around the "=" sign is ignored.

The libpwquality library also first reads all *.conf files from the /etc/security/pwquality.conf.d directory in ASCII sorted order. The values of the same settings are overriden in the order the files are parsed.

OPTIONS
The possible options in the file are:

difok
    Number of characters in the new password that must not be present in the old password. (default 1)

    The special value of 0 disables all checks of similarity of the new password with the old password except the new password being exactly the same as the old one.

minlen
    Minimum acceptable size for the new password (plus one if credits are not disabled which is the default). (See pam_pwquality(8).) Cannot be set to lower value than 6. (default 8)

dcredit
    The maximum credit for having digits in the new password. If less than 0 it is the minimum number of digits in the new password. (default 0)

ucredit
    The maximum credit for having uppercase characters in the new password. If less than 0 it is the minimum number of uppercase characters in the new password. (default 0)

lcredit
    The maximum credit for having lowercase characters in the new password. If less than 0 it is the minimum number of lowercase characters in the new password. (default 0)

ocredit
    The maximum credit for having other characters in the new password. If less than 0 it is the minimum number of other characters in the new password. (default 0)

minclass
    The minimum number of required classes of characters for the new password (digits, uppercase, lowercase, others). (default 0)

maxrepeat
    The maximum number of allowed same consecutive characters in the new password. The check is disabled if the value is 0. (default 0)

maxsequence
    The maximum length of monotonic character sequences in the new password. Examples of such sequence are '12345' or 'fedcb'. Note that most such passwords will not pass the simplicity check unless the sequence is only a minor part of the password. The check is disabled if the value is 0. (default 0)

maxclassrepeat
    The maximum number of allowed consecutive characters of the same class in the new password. The check is disabled if the value is 0. (default 0)

gecoscheck
    If nonzero, check whether the words longer than 3 characters from the GECOS field of the user's passwd(5) entry are contained in the new password. The check is disabled if the value is 0. (default 0)

dictcheck
    If nonzero, check whether the password (with possible modifications) matches a word in a dictionary. Currently the dictionary check is performed using the cracklib library. (default 1)

usercheck=N
    If nonzero, check whether the password (with possible modifications) contains the user name in some form. It is not performed for user names shorter than 3 characters. (default 1)

enforcing=N
    If nonzero, reject the password if it fails the checks, otherwise only print the warning. This setting applies only to the pam_pwquality module and possibly other applications that explicitly change their behavior based on it. It does not affect pwmake(1) and pwscore(1). (default 1)

badwords
    Space separated list of words that must not be contained in the password. These are additional words to the cracklib dictionary check. This setting can be also used by applications to emulate the gecos check for user accounts that are not created yet.

dictpath
    Path to the cracklib dictionaries. Default is to use the cracklib default.

SEE ALSO
pwscore(1), pwmake(1), pam_pwquality(8)

AUTHORS
Tomas Mraz <tmraz@redhat.com>