Advanced Password Complexity Requirements

[StevenA]

Howdy,

I have been trying to find out if it is possible to enforce an even more rigorous password policy for any type of user local/domain. Turning on password complexity is always a good thing to do, but sometimes it is just not enough. Password complexity requires that:

The password contains characters from at least three of the following five categories:

English uppercase characters (A — Z)
English lowercase characters (a — z)
Base 10 digits (0 — 9)
Non-alphanumeric (For example: !, $, #, or %)
Unicode characters


* The key thing being here that 3 of 5 must be possible. We could possibly groups Unicode and Non-alphanumeric characters together for my purposes. I would like to enforce a policy that says your password must be atleast 8 characters long AND [ contain uppercase characters, lowercase characters, base 10 digits, AND have a special/non-alphanumeric character. However, I don't see anyway to do this without a third party application. Is there anyway to do this natively in Windows, on XP, 2000, or 2003?

Please let me know if anyone knows of a way to do this without the use of a 3rd party application.

Thanks,

Steven

[Crack]

How about defining a security template and import into the group policy.
Do a search for "Security Templates" in the Help and Support center and there are instructions on how to create and import it into your group policy.