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Sites with dumb password rules

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161–170 of 327 posts

Re: Sites with dumb password rules

#161
The University of Notre Dame requires that your password be 16 characters long. But only if you are new or are changing your password. Evidently shorter passwords are just fine for the people who have been there for a while.

Of course, we have to use these passwords in quite a few circumstances where a password manager cannot be used (logging on to random terminals, etc.), and then there is the multiple random 2FA checks, in buildings that have no cell signal...

Re: Sites with dumb password rules

#162
post #159

Sites that go to lengths to block paste should burn. I use a password manager, and copying the pass manually feels so damn 1970s. Or I can try to diddle around in Developer Tools and try to unfoobar the paste.

unfoobaring the paste is usually what I do, in the end it might take longer, but at least I am beating the system.

Re: Sites with dumb password rules

#163
post #54

Hi, I made this. It seems like most of you are as enraged as I am about some of these password rules. They just flat out make me mad. It's not much, but I've actually had one company reach out to me after making it on the list and they made their password rules less dumb. So, if you find any particularly egregious offenders, do your part and submit a PR. It may actually make a difference.

I wish ING in Australia was as secure as your example site. Here we get a javascript number pad and a 4 digit numeric password. Hello 1998

Re: Sites with dumb password rules

#165

Many complaints are that non-ASCII characters (which all but one European languages have natively) are not allowed. While I agree that allowing them would be good for password security past experience has made me paranoid. Not all systems handle non-ASCII the same way, so when you change browsers or they upgrade their system your password might no longer work. Today Unicode is used a lot so it gets better, but it's s…

That might have been an excuse in 1999, but I'm not sure it's still a valid excuse in 2019. This is why you should use utf8.

Re: Sites with dumb password rules

#168
I understand that you follow some misguided security guidelines that state that a password must contain special characters and have a length of at least X.

What I don't understand is why sites use a maximum password length. They shouldn't save your password anyway, and only compare the hash, right?

Re: Sites with dumb password rules

#169
Another 'dumb' feature with PayPal (at least a couple of years ago) is that it had a 30 character limit on password length. Except it won't tell you that when you create an account, instead it just truncates your password. So when you try to log in with your 32 character password (which it will happily let you enter) you'll just get a wrong password error.

Re: Sites with dumb password rules

#170
post #168

I understand that you follow some misguided security guidelines that state that a password must contain special characters and have a length of at least X. What I don't understand is why sites use a maximum password length. They shouldn't save your password anyway, and only compare the hash, right?

Cost of calculating 10k character hash? IMO above 30 length serves no practical purpose.
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