Re: Passwordcheck configuration

Thank you for the information! This issue originated from a Department of
Defense STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guides). It's a security
check that applications and databases have to go through. I'll just leave
this one as a "finding" since there isn't a way to really configure it to
their requirements.

Thanks again for your help.

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 7:19 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Dave Hughes <dhughes20(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > I have a requirement to set some password complexity for our database
> such
> > as length of password, upper case, lower case, special characters,
> > expiration limit, reuse, etc.
>
> Usually, if you have to do something like that, we recommend setting PG to
> use PAM authentication and configuring the restrictions on the PAM side.
> The only native capability in that direction is that you can set a
> password expiration date.
>
> Note that it's widely believed that this sort of thing makes you LESS
> secure, not more. Quite aside from the well-established fact that forced
> password changes are bad from a human-factors standpoint, you can't check
> any of those other points unless the password is sent to the server as
> cleartext. That creates its own set of vulnerabilities, and I don't
> know of anybody who considers it good practice.
>
> > I saw there was a module you can use for this called passwordcheck.
> Seems
> > easy to install, but I don't see how you can configure it for you
> specific
> > needs?
>
> passwordcheck hasn't got any out-of-the-box configurability. It's mainly
> meant as sample code that people could modify if they have a mind to.
>
> (I seem to recall some recent discussion about deprecating/removing
> passwordcheck altogether, but I can't find it right now.)
>
> regards, tom lane
>