AUTH-9228 - Linux password file consistency

This information is provided as part of the Lynis community project. It is related to Lynis control AUTH-9228 and should be considered as-is and without guarantees. Any advice and commands should be tested before implementing them in production environments.

Control details
CategoryAuthentication
Application

Description

Password files like /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow should be checked on a regular basis to see if any errors are present.

How to solve

Run pwck and grpck to check password and group files. Any issues found can be solved by running vipw and vigr.

Additional resources

  • Lynis (Lynis project page)

Need more details?

Consider the upgrade to Lynis Enterprise to receive additional details and guidance. The Enterprise version helps to you with daily health checks of your environment, learn in-depth system hardening, and resources to protect your systems better.

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About

Lynis is a technical security auditing tool for Unix flavors like Linux, macOS, AIX, Solaris, and *BSD. It is open source software and free to use. Typical usage include system hardening, compliance testing, and vulnerability scanning. The project has an active community, including development via GitHub.

Lynis Enterprise

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Benefits: automate security audits, detailed reporting, compliance testing.

  • Centralized management
  • Improvement plan with priorities
  • Reporting
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  • Predefined policies
  • Integration (API)
  • Improvement snippets for tools like Ansible, Chef, Cfengine, Puppet, and SaltStack
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