101–110 of 221 posts
They use Sabre (like others), and it's an archaic holdover from when phones didn't have Qs or Zs.
Today, I learned that phones didn't have Qs or Zs. Things you don't notice on that one rotary phone your parents used to have when you were 5.
If they were OK with applying more duct tape, why not map Q and Z to characters (eg. A and B) that can be part of passwords? (eg. a password of "quiz" would become "auib") It would make their password system slightly weaker perhaps, since freq(a) then becomes more like freq(a)+freq(q) and freq(b) more like freq(b)+freq(z). I'm not sure that's much weaker than just excluding Q and Z, though. The user experience is imp…
Or you map them to something like: Q = ABDHCJSKJDHSSS Z = YYYDUHUHUHSSYS ... to avoid weakening the password.
"Cannot contain special characters or symbols (such as !#$@*, etc)"
Well, damn! Guess that won't work.
Can anyone explain why this is? I've never heard a security reason for this.
While the other answers about Sabre are probably right, I've heard that banks intentionally have stupid password policies to prevent password reuse. If one bank says "no special characters but most contain a number", another says "must contain a special character, but no numbers", and a 3rd says "must contain a number and special character", they can guarantee that if one of the 3 is hacked into it doesn't compromise…
I'd caution against making assumptions about the competence of the developers based only what you can see from the outside. More likely than not there are good reasons to maintain interoperability with legacy systems. This may well be the most elegant way to solve a complex problem. I've certainly written my share of code that would look weird to an outsider who didn't know the backstory and the constraints and the e…
This may well be the most elegant way to solve a complex problem. It seems to me that these silly, arbitrary restrictions on password lengths and contents are far too common to explain or excuse in this way. The full list of JetBlue's password restrictions looks very much like the restrictions at a zillion other sites. The "no Q or Z" thing is strikingly weird, but its probably less harmful than the (very common) low…
How, exactly, a rule like this improves security, I'm sure he cannot say, at least in a sensical way.
Most of the time, these weird rules seem to come about because of misunderstandings. The no "special" characters rule, for instance, dates from a time when most web CGI code was in Perl, and with a specially constructed series of characters in a web input field, it was easily possible to "shell out" to the operating system and even get access to data. So security people told developers: "do not allow special characters! Ever!" Instead of understanding why this rule existed, they blindly followed the order. Over time the rule got distorted, and now, which particular set of special characters is disallowed varies from site to site.
The restriction on length is obviously based on confusion: a minimum length for a password is a good idea, but imposing a short maximum length makes no sense whatsoever. (Apparently someone thinks that too many characters might cause a buffer overflow?)
[edit: wording]
I'd caution against making assumptions about the competence of the developers based only what you can see from the outside. More likely than not there are good reasons to maintain interoperability with legacy systems. This may well be the most elegant way to solve a complex problem. I've certainly written my share of code that would look weird to an outsider who didn't know the backstory and the constraints and the e…
Question to all those saying this is because of Sabre: How? Does the TrueBlue password somehow go through Sabre's systems? The truly old business unit of Sabre that everyone is referencing is Travel Network. I'm not sure why an airline's loyalty program would intersect with Travel Network other than through the back end of a booking tool.
Example: the password 'foobar9' could be mapped to 3662279
I'd caution against making assumptions about the competence of the developers based only what you can see from the outside. More likely than not there are good reasons to maintain interoperability with legacy systems. This may well be the most elegant way to solve a complex problem. I've certainly written my share of code that would look weird to an outsider who didn't know the backstory and the constraints and the e…
No. If there is a bizarre password restriction like this, it is almost certainly because they are storing the password in cleartext somewhere (bad) or because they expect users to be able to enter the password in via a telephone keypad, which vastly reduces the number of possible combinations since every number substitutes for 3-4 letters (also bad).
Actually this kind of gives me an idea: what if modern systems decided to just tell people they can't use "p" so that people stop using the word "password" or variants as their password. Hell, for that matter, tell users they can't use vowels so they can't make words. They might do leet speak, or whatever which is pretty easy to crack given time, but it stops things like password re-use attacks (people less likely to…
I doubt the security, given the prevalence of z, w, n, etc that occurs in Chinese (Mandarin) words (and likewise in other languages), doubly so because of common phrases that a lot of people would likely pick, and would heed against such a policy.
I'd caution against making assumptions about the competence of the developers based only what you can see from the outside. More likely than not there are good reasons to maintain interoperability with legacy systems. This may well be the most elegant way to solve a complex problem. I've certainly written my share of code that would look weird to an outsider who didn't know the backstory and the constraints and the e…
This may well be the most elegant way to solve a complex problem. It seems to me that these silly, arbitrary restrictions on password lengths and contents are far too common to explain or excuse in this way. The full list of JetBlue's password restrictions looks very much like the restrictions at a zillion other sites. The "no Q or Z" thing is strikingly weird, but its probably less harmful than the (very common) low…