Earlier quoted context omitted.
Password rotation does nothing more than get you to use 1234abcd@ 1234abcd@1 1234abcd@2 1234abcd@3 I'm becoming pretty convinced that at least in the corporate space, we'd be way better off with a required 30 character minimum password, with the only rules being against gross repetition or sequences. (no a * 30 or abcd...yz1234567890 ). Teach people to use passphrases and work on absolutely minimizing the number of t…
"Your password is too similar to your previous password" Hmm, how would you know that.
Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
371–380 of 539 posts
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually it can be trivial as long as you can require the user to re-type the current password when entering a new password; check hash first, then check edit distance with the entered "current password" (and, of course, promptly throw it away once you know the edit distance.)
Ohh. I guess that's what Windows does when a user wants to change their own password in the domain.
So, it can hash any proposed password and compare the history to make it's not been seen $recently (as an exact match, since it's comparing hashes).
It could also perform some minor permutations of any new password, and do the same history check to make sure you're not just changing the first or last character or digit. I don't know if it does this, but it could.
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
PCI requires multi-factor auth these days, so you’ll likely find now the ssh password will be your password plus a OTP at the end.
Isn’t there a way to ask for OTP after initiating the SSH session?
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#374I don't like it, but frequent reauth does limit the blast radius of stolen session tokens.
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
~0 people want to remember passwords. generating passwords for them without offering to securely store them in a password manager strikes me as misguided.
People should absolutely be using password managers where possible. A website doesn't have control over whether you are using a password manager though. This is about stopping the human from generating a password themselves, which will be terrible.
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#376The alternatives proposed are "just always check right before a sensitive action" and "use continuous verification". Both of which are much harder to pull off correctly than short-lived authentication sessions (unless you buy their product, of course, supposedly), especially on third-party services you don't control the source or manage the deployment for.
Oh, and of course, "just make everyone lock their screens". If only it was that easy. If basic rules like that worked, we could ditch half the security measures we have for websites. What's next, "just use unique passwords of 20+ characters for each website"?
Also, this is putting a lot of trust in solutions like Windows Hello. I can't speak for the security of Apple's implementation, but thanks to bad vendor implementations (including Microsoft's own!), Windows Hello hardware is full of security holes. At some point one company decided to take a look at a few of those devices [and found security problems in all of them](https://blackwinghq.com/blog/posts/a-touch-of-pwn-part-i/).
Short token longevity also protects against one use risk Tailscale have a solution for: users logging in to their personal accounts on public computers. That's still an essential use case for people without internet access or computer access at home. Often these people are more vulnerable (homeless, very poor) so relying on them clicking the "log out" button on every website they're forced to interact with is not going to work.
Kerberos (or buying what Tailscale sells) does offer a somewhat nicer authentication flow, but that still doesn't work reliably on every browser on every OS on every device and it requires people to follow basic rules like "lock your screen", which is a massive risk. Passwords will always work anywhere and their security can be somewhat enforced.
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#377Forced password rotation and expiry seems the bigger problem; given that it causes people to get locked out so often, (e.g. if pw expires when on holiday), — often then requiring travelling to IT, or at least a few hours trying to get IT on the phone to reset, or chasing up colleagues who aren't locked out to get in touch with IT. Many (most?) companies still do it, despite it now not being recommended by NIST: > Ver…
Does anyone not add the year & month of the last password change to the end of their password? E.g. PascalCasePassphraseGoesHere2025-06, then at the next required change in (for example) 6 months: PascalCasePassphraseGoesHere2026-01. It almost certainly fits the inane "letter, number, and special character" requirements they probably have, complies with "different from your last X passwords", and is easy to keep trac…
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#378Forced password rotation and expiry seems the bigger problem; given that it causes people to get locked out so often, (e.g. if pw expires when on holiday), — often then requiring travelling to IT, or at least a few hours trying to get IT on the phone to reset, or chasing up colleagues who aren't locked out to get in touch with IT. Many (most?) companies still do it, despite it now not being recommended by NIST: > Ver…
Bad habits are hard to kill. Sometimes you just cant convince people that something is no longer recommended.
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes when I log into a random website and I see a forced password reset, I wonder if it has been compromised, rather than setting a time-based expiry. If a site owner knows that certain accounts are part of a database breach or something, a reasonable step would be to force the users to change the password at next login.
Another common reason to do a force password reset is if they've moved authentication providers and were not able to bring their hashes along. Some providers don't allow for hash export (Cognito, Entra).
Re: Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
People should absolutely be using password managers where possible. A website doesn't have control over whether you are using a password manager though. This is about stopping the human from generating a password themselves, which will be terrible.
I mean, at this point might as well drop the password requirement completely and send an email login link every time a user gets logged out and wants to log back in. It's how 'reset password' feature works for some people anyway.
The supposition for all this is that the service wants to use passwords for whatever reason. In that case, generate them for the user.