I thought the second part of his conclusion was a bit hasty: "... and change all your logins every six months at least." Does he have any idea how impractical this is? If I could even remember every login I ever made, it would probably take more than 12 hours to do the manual labor of changing the password for them. No thank you!
Forced changing of passwords every x months is pretty common in the workplace, especially if the company is Windows based. The problem is it's so easy to make your passwords be +1, then +2, etc. I've worked at places that detected that pattern and didn't allow it, so I would just hold down the shift key and iterate anyway, yielding +!, then +@, +#, etc. So even forcing your users to change their passwords will most l…
You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
61–70 of 86 posts
Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#62Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#63Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#64Yes. This is why I use a password hash function. The exact Hash function is in my head (and only my head), although it requires a lookup table for random bits. The lookup table is typically a poem, (when I was younger, I would use digits of pi, but I consider that insecure now), but can really be any sequence of words about 50+ that I can reproduce pretty much instantaneously. The exact hash algorithm is my secret, b…
How do you deal with the url if it can change? For example, you register for example.com on http://register.example.com and then login on https://login.example.com and in the future they may change it to https://examplelogin.com/auth/ Or what if the company changes name? For example, I used to log into my bank on http://wamu.com and now they are bought by Chase so it's http://chase.com
Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what's keeping you from switching banks? If my bank did this, I'd switch immediately. Any bank that shows that level of concern for my finances doesn't deserve to be controlling them.
If you work in the US, you tend not to have that luxury with your 401k. Your employer picks the financial institution and you're stuck with it. See also health insurance.
Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#66Now I mostly use pwdhash.com and three or so tiers of passwords. Works well. I still have the GPG file, but I use it mostly for keeping track of my gibberish answers to dumb security questions ("who was your senior prom date/where did you meet your wife").
Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#67The problem with password managers is, when you're away from whatever machine you managed to get the thing set up on, you're locked out of all your accounts.
Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#68For those who don't want to write code, I shared an implementation of that here: http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/projects/password-generator (please tell me if I made any error)
Re: You have exactly three passwords, don't you?
#69I thought the second part of his conclusion was a bit hasty: "... and change all your logins every six months at least." Does he have any idea how impractical this is? If I could even remember every login I ever made, it would probably take more than 12 hours to do the manual labor of changing the password for them. No thank you!
Forced changing of passwords every x months is pretty common in the workplace, especially if the company is Windows based. The problem is it's so easy to make your passwords be +1, then +2, etc. I've worked at places that detected that pattern and didn't allow it, so I would just hold down the shift key and iterate anyway, yielding +!, then +@, +#, etc. So even forcing your users to change their passwords will most l…