Password Policies and Account Lockout Measure on EPM native 'ADMIN' and External Directory Users

As part of EPM Application audit and security control, most of us would have got this requirement to apply User account lockout measures on all EPM users whenever there is some specified number of consecutive failed login attempts.

Being no exception we too faced this question. Our security team had released following 'Account lockout' requirements to be implemented in EPM:

• Account lockout after 6 or less consecutive failed login attempts.
• Re-enable locked account after 30 minutes of lockout.

So we explored the available options in EPM that I have shared below.

We know there are mainly two types of users in EPM system:

1. Hyperion Shared Services Native users (Admin etc.)
2. External directory users (Microsoft Active Directory-MSAD, LDAP-enabled user directory, Oracle Internet Directory-OID etc.)

Lets see both one by one.

Hyperion Shared Services Native Directory users (Admin etc.)

There is no inbuilt account lockout and password policies setting for EPM Native Directory users including EPM Shared Services ‘Admin’ account. Therefore EPM Shared services 'Admin' account never gets locked after any number of unsuccessful login attempts (due to the obvious reason that if ADMIN gets locked in EPM then none can unlock it). 

On entering wrong password for EPM native ‘Admin’ account, it keeps throwing following error without being locked:

EPMCSS-00301: Failed to authenticate user. Invalid credentials. Enter valid credentials.

You can mitigate this risk for native 'Admin' user failed login attempts by creating a script or using any log analyzing tool to monitor Framework.log present on all Foundation servers (E:\apps\OracleEPM\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\servers\FoundationServicesN\logs\Framework.log) which records the messages for both successful and failed login attempts made by EPM native 'Admin' user.

External directory users (Microsoft Active Directory-MSAD or an LDAP-enabled user directory such as Oracle Internet Directory-OID)

There is no settings within EPM application (till EPM 11.2 release) which can be used to control password policies and account lockout measures for external directory users. 

For external directory users (MSAD, LDAP, OID etc.), password policies and Account lockout measure on failed login attempts can be enforced and controlled at external directory side setup only. So you can check with your external AD team and define password policies for external AD users to specify how many logon attempts to allow before locking out end users and how they will be unlocked. 

EPM System honors all locks controlled by the password policies for the external user directory. Whatever Account lockout policy is set there by your Active Directory (AD) team, EPM system will simply follow that.

That's all for this post.

I hope this article has helped you. Your suggestions/feedback are most welcome.

Keep learning and Have a great day!!!

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