Regulations that specify password length?

Question

I have read:

• PCI DSS 1.2
• SOX 404
• AR 25-2
• ISO 27001

But only PCI DSS specifies a minimum password length.

Are there any other regulations that dictate password lengths for any industry?

NIST documents talk about the impacts of certain lengths and complexities [NIST SP 800-63b now provides guidance on password length]. OWASP, SANS, and others give their opinions on password minimums, but they couldn't be considered official.

Not looking for recommendations or impacts of various lengths, but actual regulations that require a certain length. For the purposes of this question, it doesn't even matter if the regulations are good or not, just some regulatory body saying that passwords must be at least a certain length.

Answer 1

I believe the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publishes the United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB, formerly known as Federal Desktop Core Configuration or FDCC) checklists, which specify the password complexity, lifetime, and history requirements for U.S. federal organizations. Also, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) publishes Benchmarks for various platforms, which include similar recommendations.

Between the two, the highest mark is:

• 12 characters minimum.
• At least three character types.
• Expiration in 60 days.
• Minimum lifetime of 1 day.
• No reuse within 24 passwords.
• Some OS-specific additional requirements may be applied.

Those settings are applied at the OS level. I'm not sure if either organization has similar specifications specifically targeting applications or websites, but most organizations which are subject to these will probably just use the same requirements as they do in the OS.

A Google search for any of the above terms should turn up a wealth of information. (I may add links here myself later, or anyone else is free to edit them in.)

Answer 2

To be honest the "official documentation" for all of these standards is incomplete, and as a CISSP in the industry it's really annoying.

How I look at it is that no one is going to approve you if you have known vulnerabilities in your software, period. The authority for this is the Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT), and CERTs issue CVE numbers for vulnerabilities. All CERTs use the Common Weakness Enumeration system to classify vulnerabilities in software.

There is CWE-521 - Weak Password Requirements which lists the following:

1. Minimum and maximum length;
2. Require mixed character sets (alpha, numeric, special, mixed case);
3. Do not contain user name;
4. Expiration;
5. No password reuse.

It should be noted that the CWE system is a tree, and the parent of CWE-521 is CWE-255 credentials management.

Answer 3

Since you are looking for ANY regulatory body, whether applicable to you or not, Department of Defense Instruction 8500.2, Information Assurance Implementation states:

For systems utilizing a logon ID as the individual identifier, passwords are, at a minimum, a case sensitive, 8-character mix of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters, including at least one of each (e.g., emPagd2!). At least four characters must be changed when a new password is created.

Answer 4

NIST SP 800-63b [in draft] now provides detailed guidance for passwords at different levels of authentication levels.

A Memorized Secret (a.k.a 'password') SHALL be at least 8 characters in length if chosen by the subscriber; memorized secrets chosen randomly by the CSP or verifier SHALL be at least 6 characters in length and MAY be entirely numeric.

Answer 5

Most of the federal regulations are ambiguous on purpose. They say you have to be secure but don't give you specific instructions on how. PCI-DSS is a Contract that you have to sign in order to do business using Credit Cards. Because of things like the Fair Credit Reporting Act that puts the burden of stolen credit card transactions on the Credit Card companies, you bet your butt they are going to be very specific and measurable.

To answer your question directly, no, I am not aware of any other regulation or contract that specifies measurable security controls other then PCI-DSS. Most of the answers listed are things that you/your company can prescribe to but not they are not required. PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, GLBA are required depending on whether you are dealing with Credit Card, Health Info, Publicly Traded or Financial. There may be some Statutory or International laws that you would have to consider and those can be very specific and/or very confusing. Especially in Canada when you try to figure out if you have to enforce privacy controls based on National, Provincial regulation or some Ministry via contract.

Answer 6

The best regulation I've seen in regards to password complexity is in the CIS guidelines which are referred to by other regulations. But even they say "The setting shown above is one possible policy. Alter these values to conform to your own organization's password policies." An example from here https://benchmarks.cisecurity.org/tools2/linux/CIS_CentOS_Linux_7_Benchmark_v1.1.0.pdf

6.3.2 Set Password Creation Requirement Parameters Using pam_pwquality (Scored)

Profile Applicability:

• Level 1

Description: The pam_pwquality module checks of the strength of passwords. It performs checks such as making sure a password is not a dictionary word, it is a certain length, contains a mix of characters (e.g. alphabet, numeric, other) and more. The following are definitions of the pam_pwquality.so options.

• try_first_pass - retrieve the password from a previous stacked PAM module. If not available, then prompt the user for a password.
• retry=3 - Allow 3 tries before sending back a failure.

The following options are set in the /etc/security/pwquality.conf file:

• minlen=14 - password must be 14 characters or more
• dcredit=-1 - provide at least 1 digit
• ucredit=-1 - provide at least one uppercase character
• ocredit=-1 - provide at least one special character
• lcredit=-1 - provide at least one lowercase character