Restrict Users to Use Old Passwords

This is very useful if you want to disallow users to use same old passwords. The old password file is located at/etc/security/opasswd. This can be achieved by using PAM module.

Open ‘/etc/pam.d/system-auth‘ file under RHEL / CentOS / Fedora.

# vi /etc/pam.d/system-auth

Open ‘/etc/pam.d/common-password‘ file under Ubuntu/Debian/Linux Mint.

# vi /etc/pam.d/common-password

Add the following line to ‘auth‘ section.

auth        sufficient    pam_unix.so likeauth nullok

Add the following line to ‘password‘ section to disallow a user from re-using last 5 password of his or her.

password   sufficient    pam_unix.so nullok use_authtok md5 shadow remember=5

Only last 5 passwords are remember by server. If you tried to use any of last 5 old passwords, you will get an error like.

Password has been already used. Choose another.