How to increase the minimum password length in AIX

Submitted by root on

root's picture

By default, AIX maximum password lenght is 8. This restriction is due to the default encryption algorithm.
In AIX 6.1 this can be changed (I opted out AIX 5.x since it's out of support since April 2012)

Just execute this command on the server where you need to do this:
chsec -f /etc/security/login.cfg -s usw -a pwd_algorithm=smd5

After this when you change a users password you will see a different form of hash in /etc/security/passwd.

When setting the minimum password length with "chuser" will work to put values grater than 8. (In SMIT help you will see that max password length is still mentioned 8, it's a feature, not a bug but it will work)

More information about this is on IBM website:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.aix.security%2Fdoc%2Fsecurity%2Flong_passwords.htm

Thou shalt not steal!

If you want to use this information on your own website, please remember: by doing copy/paste entirely it is always stealing and you should be ashamed of yourself! Have at least the decency to create your own text and comments and run the commands on your own servers and provide your output, not what I did!

Or at least link back to this website.

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