Where passwords or passphrases are authentication factors for Requirement 8.3.1, they must at minimum: be at least 12 characters long (or at least eight characters if the system cannot support 12); and include both numeric and alphabetic characters. The guidance suggests entities can consider screening against a list of known bad passwords and adding special or mixed-case characters. Applicability: not intended for point-of-sale terminal user accounts that are limited to a single card number per transaction, nor for application or system accounts, which section 8.6 governs. Until 31 March 2025 the minimum was seven characters, which was the rule under PCI DSS v3.2.1. Objective under the customized approach: neither online nor offline brute forcing can confirm a guessed password or passphrase. Future-dated: treated as a best practice up to 31 March 2025 and mandatory since then.
This control maps to 26 controls across 20 other frameworks. If you already hold one of them, the evidence you collected for it is the starting point here rather than new work.
Every mapping shown was judged rather than inferred from wording similarity, and the ones that failed review are published too. See the coverage reports and what was rejected.
PCI DSS 4.0 8.3.6 is one control. If you already hold one of the frameworks below, a reviewed crosswalk already says how much of PCI DSS 4.0 your existing evidence covers. Hold ISO 27001:2022 and 139 of 280 PCI DSS 4.0 controls already carry evidence.
Each report names every control your existing framework evidences, every one it does not, the reasoning behind each claim, and the claims that were argued against and rejected. 415 were rejected on the ISO 27001:2022 pair alone.
The graph holds this control, the 26 it maps to, and the evidence behind each claim, over MCP and REST.