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Description of problem: I've just wanted to correct wrongly entered password (due to different keyboard layout) but was disallowed to. This makes no sense, as it can be easily workarounded by changing to something completely different at first, then changing to whatever you need, it just annoys the user. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): passwd-0.79-1.el7 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. run passwd (as ordinary user) 2. try to change the password to nearly the same as before just with one character different Actual results: you get BAD PASSWORD error and cannot use the new password Expected results: the password gets changed Additional info:
This check happens in *pwquality (... and is configured in system-auth, which Tomáš owns as well.) Reassigning for him to consider. FWIW, the workaround you propose can be, and is in some deployments, prevented by setting up a minimal password validity, and potentially remembering more past passwords.
You can also set up minimal number of days before you're allowed to change your password again. The similarity check was there for a very long time and I don't think we should remove it. Basically all the checks in libpwquality/cracklib can be sometimes annoying but with this attitude we could drop pam_pwquality from the system-auth altoghether.