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Dumb Password Rules

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Re: Dumb Password Rules

#51
post #41

I created an issue for this, but one really dumb thing is inconsistent password verification. Bestbuy will let you use anything for a password but on login really long passwords will trip it up. Been able to reproduce it a few times with 64 character passwords generated from 1pass.

Why use a 64-character password? This post suggests more than ~21 random characters (128 bits) doesn't get you extra (practical) security: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33196/is-there-...

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#52
The Covered California website suffers from the dumb password problem. It took me 6 tries with Last pass before I could generate a random password that "matched" their hidden rules.

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#53
I think the reason that many banks still have "stupid" requirements (as seen in this thread) is because many of them still offer "banking by phone" -- i.e. calling into an automated system and using DTMF tones to enter your password/PIN/etc.

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#54

I use KeePass to store all of my (randomly generated) passwords. One ongoing annoyance is that it's increasingly difficult to generate a random string will be meet a given site's Dumb Password Rules, because so many sites have them, and there's surprisingly little overlap in the rules. I would really like to see a database of sites and their corresponding Dumb Password Rules, so that I can tell KeePass (or any other…

KeePass should let users configure a pattern for passwords, like "8-25 letters or numbers or these symbols, must have 1 uppercase letter", and just replicate that socially (the pair of web site and pattern) across all KeePass users.

Sure, but there are other password managers with this same problem. I'm suggesting something more like the tz database - a common, authoritative source of truth for any password generator / database app to use. Just like the tz database, it would require some maintenance, but I think it would be worthwhile (yes, I would volunteer to maintain it, if others were to volunteer to add support for same in the various keepass implementations I use).

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#56
What is HN's opinion on XKCD-936? Is it valid, or complete rubbish - or somewhere in-between?

The last time I researched this, I found a number of different opinions, but they ultimately trended toward it being a "good idea", with the caveat that the words need to be chosen by a truly random process, and not by the user (as then bias would creep in).

I'm not a cryptographer, though - maybe someone(s) here is and can give some further insight?

Also - if such a password is a good thing, it would probably be best to use it for a password manager, and let the manager generate long random passwords for individual logins.

If XKCD-936 is considered ok, then in theory, as long as the password field allows for reasonably long passwords (25+ characters), and simple letters and numbers - it should be ok.

The problem would then be education (for the users and developers - plus convincing IT/security/management) - we've all been conditioned that passwords need to appear complex (not that they actually are for a computer). Then of course, there's the problem that this is baked into financial/banking security rules passed by Congress (so if XKCD-936 is correct, it basically means we've legislated an insecure practice in place, based on faulty knowledge at the time, for the one area where we need the most security possible)...

Thoughts?

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KeePass should let users configure a pattern for passwords, like "8-25 letters or numbers or these symbols, must have 1 uppercase letter", and just replicate that socially (the pair of web site and pattern) across all KeePass users.

Sounds like a good idea at first, but could also be a huge attack point.

The "replicate" bit sounds deeply alarming - a password manager using social or learned rules just screams vulnerability. If you made me guess an attack, I'd picture someone paying for a server cluster or botnet to repeatedly assert super-restrictive rules, and then use their knowledge of those rules to guess the generated passwords.

Allowing some basic rule-setting, though, sounds quite nice. Arbitrary restrictions will probably leave people setting bad passwords, but there are some very common flags like "must have a special character" or "can't have a special character" that it'd be convenient to access for these sites.

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#58

I use KeePass to store all of my (randomly generated) passwords. One ongoing annoyance is that it's increasingly difficult to generate a random string will be meet a given site's Dumb Password Rules, because so many sites have them, and there's surprisingly little overlap in the rules. I would really like to see a database of sites and their corresponding Dumb Password Rules, so that I can tell KeePass (or any other…

KeePass should let users configure a pattern for passwords, like "8-25 letters or numbers or these symbols, must have 1 uppercase letter", and just replicate that socially (the pair of web site and pattern) across all KeePass users.

Even without the social aspect, it would be nice to just have some common flags you can set like "uppercase required, special characters banned" when generating for a specific site.

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#59
post #36

Popular German bank „Sparkasse“ has this great online banking system that allows you only 5 characters (Small and large, numbers, umlauts and eszet[1]). They call it a PIN (Personal identification /number/), but IMO its terribly insecure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F

The entire 'pin' scheme frustrates me. I've started to see it in a growing number of places as full authentication - either no password or pin accepted without the password.

5 characters with those options obviously isn't enough, but it's still better than "four digit numeric", which is also out there. That's such a small space that you can try it by hand, for god's sake.

Re: Dumb Password Rules

#60

I use KeePass to store all of my (randomly generated) passwords. One ongoing annoyance is that it's increasingly difficult to generate a random string will be meet a given site's Dumb Password Rules, because so many sites have them, and there's surprisingly little overlap in the rules. I would really like to see a database of sites and their corresponding Dumb Password Rules, so that I can tell KeePass (or any other…

KeePass should let users configure a pattern for passwords, like "8-25 letters or numbers or these symbols, must have 1 uppercase letter", and just replicate that socially (the pair of web site and pattern) across all KeePass users.

It does let you configure a pattern and even save the pattern for reuse. It's the replicate socially that's not implemented. Might be a fun idea for a KeePass plugin.
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