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Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

arstechnica.com

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#61

I found this very strange The permitted characters and length for passwords are defined as a regular expression in Evernote’s API, but spaces are left out, Evernote says, because leading and trailing spaces presents a problem. “Software needs to precisely determine how to treat leading and trailing spaces,” Dave Engberg, Evernote’s CTO, told Ars. “Some UI frameworks and third-party applications would unreliably trim…

Additionally. "Adding support for spaces only in the middle of the password would make the regular expression defining them three times longer, Engberg said." So they admit they already have the regex definition that would allow this, but for some reason don't want to put it in production? How strange.

Sounds like he's thinking his regex is of their allowed "set" of [A-Za-z0-9!@#$%^&*()_.-], and thinks that to support space but not at start or end, he'd need ^[set][ set]{6,}[set]$, repeating his set 3 times except with a space added to the middle set. That's not accurate. He can add a space to his set, then put a not-space assertion at the start and end, like ^(?! )[ set]{8,}(?<! )$ and call it a day. (And perhaps \A and \Z instead of ^ and $ depending on what he does with new lines.)

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#62

I found this very strange The permitted characters and length for passwords are defined as a regular expression in Evernote’s API, but spaces are left out, Evernote says, because leading and trailing spaces presents a problem. “Software needs to precisely determine how to treat leading and trailing spaces,” Dave Engberg, Evernote’s CTO, told Ars. “Some UI frameworks and third-party applications would unreliably trim…

Additionally. "Adding support for spaces only in the middle of the password would make the regular expression defining them three times longer, Engberg said." So they admit they already have the regex definition that would allow this, but for some reason don't want to put it in production? How strange.

The better question is why is there a regex in the first place? If someone wants to set their password to some random chinese characters then why shouldn't they be able to?

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#63
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a brokerage account with Schwab and I am using a 10 character password, so I can confirm your skepticism.

Try logging in with just the first 6 characters of your password and see if it's really looking at all 10 of them. Edit: Someone else commented saying it might actually be the first 8, so try that too if you want.

I just confirmed this with my account, it's truncating at 8 chars.

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#64

It's not that they don't care, they are managing support headaches, and balancing risk to reward. 6 Character AlphaNumeric for Schwab is because they use the same password for phone, and this is a throwback to a "Pin". They could at least be honest that this is why it is what it is. The Fobs they send that generate a random number to go with your login make this not a deal breaker for me. Microsoft is balancing suppo…

> If you can have a 32 character password it is more likely to be forgotten.

I disagree. There are many long passwords that are easier to remember than a short password. Just to make up an example, I might use "WakeGrindTampInfusePourSip" as a password--it's the sequence of actions that lead to my morning caffeine fix. Compare that to a password that must be between 6 and 12 characters, with one lowercase letter, one capital letter, one numeral, and no special characters. Nothing in my life maps readily onto that schema except for my AOL password from 1996, so I'm going to make something up on the spot, forget it immediately, and rely on the password reset functionality every time I want to log in.

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#65
post #56
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if users don't like entering certain characters on a mobile phone, they can pick a different password Fundamentally, I don't think it's unreasonable to try to protect users from themselves.

You do have a valid point. I used to have a password with a backtick (`) in it. That is a standard key on a QWERTY keyboard but seemingly untypeable on an iPhone. I didn't realize that until I actually tried to enter that password on my iPhone.

Here's how to do it: Hold down the apostrophe key until a menu pops up showing similar characters, then choose the backtick.

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#66

The brokerage and banking company Charles Schwab has strict length limits— passwords can be no longer than six characters. I'm a little dubious of this claim as I have several accounts (checking, savings and brokerage) with Charles Schwab and my password is longer than 6 characters. I'd be interested in knowing where they got this information.

When I've tried to set a new password to one which includes symbols and is longer than 6 - 8 chars, they've rejected it.

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#67
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying to get someone to stop punching you, just punch yourself. DOSing yourself to stop a DOS :/

how so? cutting off an IP after many failed passwords is good security anyway. Only side affect may be if someone's machine is infected and taking part in the attack they get locked out while it goes on.

He didn't say cut off an IP address.

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying to get someone to stop punching you, just punch yourself. DOSing yourself to stop a DOS :/

Nope, what typically happens is the account gets locked out and requires a confirmation sent to the account's email address to unlock it.

So a soft DOS then. Not much of a solution, still fully exploitable.

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#69
post #65
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have a valid point. I used to have a password with a backtick (`) in it. That is a standard key on a QWERTY keyboard but seemingly untypeable on an iPhone. I didn't realize that until I actually tried to enter that password on my iPhone.

Here's how to do it: Hold down the apostrophe key until a menu pops up showing similar characters, then choose the backtick.

Good to know. I am not sure if that is a relatively new feature, but a quick Google search didn't reveal the answer when I initially ran into the problem. It was easier to just change my password than to delve too deep into it.

Re: Why your password can’t have symbols—or be longer than 16 characters

#70

I remember once reading a bank's FAQ trying to explain why passwords couldn't contain SELECT, UPDATE, DROP, or DELETE. I can't find it now so hopefully that little problem has been fixed...

No offensive words either! We don't want our engineers looking through our big plaintext files to get offended.

I have various Google products under my account, which is my real name.

One time I gave feedback to Google, from a Google feedback form, and gave my real (and had been in use for years) googlemail account name on this Google form.

The form rejected it, because my real name has a mild swear in it.

That kind of thing is vaguely disappointing.

I did suddenly have to change all the answers to my 'secret questions' when I realised that I'd have to read them out loud if I needed to get back into my bank account. Lots of profanity snipped there.

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