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I hate password rules

schneier.com

71–80 of 447 posts

Re: I hate password rules

#71
post #6

Well I suppose this is trying to avoid people using obvious passwords but I'm not ever sure it works. At least password rotation ( = xxx1, xxx2 etc) has gone out of favour. Ideally we need AI to say "No! Not your wife's birthday!".

If your company accepts credit card transactions you have to comply with certification rules that require frequent password resets. That comes with a volume discount on post-its

Re: I hate password rules

#72

My frustration isn't just the sites that make the password rules clear after I submit the form. The worst sites are the ones that truncate my generated password to fit their maximum password length and then don't tell me (which seems to happen in more places than it should).

Can I ask what length your passwords are (roughly)? I don't understand the motivation for anything long in the context of randomly generated passwords for websites. 8-10 characters should be plenty. (This isn't to excuse silent truncation.)

My passwords are all 20+ characters long

Re: I hate password rules

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One costs money and requires a physical item, the other is commonly free, and you can sign in from multiple locations/devices. Hardware tokens have only managed to prove that hardware tokens won't ever take off due to their inherent limitations and liabilities.

Make them required, they will take off. Most phones made in the past few years can operate as one.

> Most phones

Are you going to force people to use specific smartphones?

Re: I hate password rules

#74

My frustration isn't just the sites that make the password rules clear after I submit the form. The worst sites are the ones that truncate my generated password to fit their maximum password length and then don't tell me (which seems to happen in more places than it should).

The worst sites are the ones that truncate my generated password to fit their maximum password length and then don't tell me Or worse, they truncate your password after you've already used it for years and years. I had a 30-character password with Bank of America. Somewhere along the line, it changed its password requirements to only allow a maximum of 20 or 25 characters (I forget), which automatically invalidated m…

>Or worse, they truncate your password after you've already used it for years and years.

Worse than that must be the sudden realization that your bank probably saves your password in plain text somewhere.

Re: I hate password rules

#75

My frustration isn't just the sites that make the password rules clear after I submit the form. The worst sites are the ones that truncate my generated password to fit their maximum password length and then don't tell me (which seems to happen in more places than it should).

Can I ask what length your passwords are (roughly)? I don't understand the motivation for anything long in the context of randomly generated passwords for websites. 8-10 characters should be plenty. (This isn't to excuse silent truncation.)

My passwords are long because I don't actually use a password manager. I generate my passwords with a help of my algorithm that makes them easier to type in wherever I might need them (resemble real words) like in a terminal.

Re: I hate password rules

#77
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what length your passwords are (roughly)? I don't understand the motivation for anything long in the context of randomly generated passwords for websites. 8-10 characters should be plenty. (This isn't to excuse silent truncation.)

My passwords are all 20+ characters long

For websites, you're just making your own life harder for no real gain. Even with purely alphanumeric 10 chars, it's not like anyone can exhaust the 36^10 password space over a network with no one noticing. Yet whenever you run into issues with the website or the password manager (or some other non-routine thing... like you're on your phone and need to enter this on a different computer) and have to enter it manually, it'll be much more painful than it has to be.

Re: I hate password rules

#78

Due to the nature of my job and the age of some of my coworkers, I am sometimes casually given passwords on a piece of paper. Out of a sample size of conservatively 20, I have never even once (!) seen a special character other than !. It just doesn't happen. Password rules and a requirement to change your password every X months are pure security mirage and just create frustration in people who often struggle to gene…

Sounds like we have similar roles. I've never gotten them on paper, but multiple times a month I get emails along the lines of "My account doesn't work. My password is Banana1. Please fix". Every time I reset every single password they have (at least 4 hours of work for them) and inform them not to share passwords. Still, I've had users do it multiple times.

I finally got all of our admin/root passwords into a password manager with sharing among job functions and our CTO as backup to ensure some level of continuity. After losing passwords to multiple production systems after someone leaving the company it was still a battle.

Re: I hate password rules

#79

My frustration isn't just the sites that make the password rules clear after I submit the form. The worst sites are the ones that truncate my generated password to fit their maximum password length and then don't tell me (which seems to happen in more places than it should).

I've also had fun experiences where the "special characters" differ in the description than in the implementation in a few ways.

Once I had a password accepted with non-alpha numeric characters which were considered invalid as input on the login screen and so even though my password was correct it would not let me log in because it was validated with different logic after creation.

Another issue I've seen is that the password was required to have only a certain subset of non-alphanumeric characters, but it did not explain or validate this client side so I had a password for which all the boxes turned green, but was still invalid.

In both cases only trial and error worked to find a valid password.

Re: I hate password rules

#80

My frustration isn't just the sites that make the password rules clear after I submit the form. The worst sites are the ones that truncate my generated password to fit their maximum password length and then don't tell me (which seems to happen in more places than it should).

The worst sites are the ones that truncate my generated password to fit their maximum password length and then don't tell me Or worse, they truncate your password after you've already used it for years and years. I had a 30-character password with Bank of America. Somewhere along the line, it changed its password requirements to only allow a maximum of 20 or 25 characters (I forget), which automatically invalidated m…

I'm not sure why anyone uses banks like BoA, Wells Fargo, First Niagara, etc.

Fidelity is a superior experience in nearly every way - just categorically. I'm not sure if people just don't know that you can use Fidelity this way?

The only downsides are no local branches, but that's hardly an issue unless you need a cashiers check. In those rare cases you can spin up an account at shitty bank, get the check, then close the account. I've had to do that maybe once ever.

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