How do I enforce a password complexity policy?

Password complexity is enforced by the pam_cracklib module.

In order to modify the password policy for your local machine, you will need to modify your /etc/pam.d/common-password file.

From a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T), enter the following command:

sudo -i gedit /etc/pam.d/common-password

Add the following line to the file (before pam_unix.so or whichever PAM module is used primarily for authentication, as can be seen from examples in the manpage) and save the file:

password requisite pam_cracklib.so ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 dcredit=-1  ocredit=-1

This statement implements the following password requirements:

• dcredit == digit
• ucredit == upper-case character
• lcredit ==lower-case character
• ocredit == other character (special characters, including ! , @ # $ %)

This should satisfy your requirements.

You could also use the variables minlength and retries to further restrict the password requirements.

Here is another good example of modifying a password policy in this manner would be placing the following line in the /etc/pam.d/common-password file:

password requisite pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=10 difok=3 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 dcredit=-1  ocredit=-1

This entry will set a maximum of three attempts at getting an acceptable password with a 10-character minimum length.

This sets the requirement for users to have a minimum of three characters different from the last password.

This will also fulfill the requirement of having the password contain at least one each of digit, lower-case character, and upper-case characters.

See also this article on setting up stronger password policy rules in linux.