Largest Study of its Kind Shows Outdated Password Practices are Widespread::undefined

  • @[email protected]
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    1061 year ago

    The article focuses on password requirements that websites implement, not user behaviors. Common bad practices mentioned:

    • Permit very short passwords
    • Do not block common passwords
    • Use outdated requirements like complex characters
    • @[email protected]
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      191 year ago

      Complex characters are outdated? It also refers to special characters but I guess that’s what I was thinking of. So special characters are in, so what is a complex character then?

      • @[email protected]
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        531 year ago

        Length is the most important thing, everything else is somewhat secondary. We should be shifting thinking of this to passphrases rather than passwords.

        I’m sure most of us have seen the “correct horse battery staple” XKCD, but that’s what people really need to think of as passwords now, not my-favourite-celebrity-but-with-the-“e”-changed-to-“3”-and-an-exclamation-mark-at-the-end.

        • @[email protected]
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          141 year ago

          Nah fuck that. Sites need to adopt this passkeys instead. It’s an impossible task for people to have unique credentials for every site, even if they are “memorable”. This is a design issue not a personal responsibility one. When designing for large volumes of people, you have to assume that the majority will do something easy and stupid over difficult and smart.

          • @[email protected]
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            141 year ago

            Until they do, password managers get you most of the way there, by letting you have a single password on your side, mapping to one password for each login. Bitwarden is great, and free.

          • @[email protected]
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            101 year ago

            Sites need to stop needing an account for everything. My haveibeenpwnd is full of sites that I can’t believe had my email in the first place. Obviously I gave it to them but like cmon

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          Thanks for this, I knew the concept but I’ve always had a hard time putting it to words. Yeah, its not like they increase the entropy or anything. Same with diacritics

          Reminds me of when Michael tells Dwight he and Jim make different amounts: its not about higher or lower, its just different

          • @[email protected]
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            41 year ago

            Either you or I got wooshed, cause I thought that was a maths joke, not actually an answer.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 year ago

              If your password is onky made up of numbers and there’s no or a faulty anti-replay feature, you can just keep tryinguntil you iterate to the right password.

              People used to do it with 4 digit PINs

      • r00ty
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        61 year ago

        I think enforcing complex characters is outdated. Allowing them is enough, since someone brute forcing still needs to consider them. Of course they could try all lower, then mixed, then including complex characters in that order to catch those that don’t. But still, it’s better to have a password made up of compound words that is longer, than S0meth!ngV3ryC0nvolu73D. Or just pure random (aka password generator)

        My main issue is places that have a maximum password length. This is firstly a limitation on security, but more importantly throws a red flag because of the potential reasons for having a password length limit!

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          Depends on the limit really, if the limit is 32 characters or something like that, definite red flag.

          If the limit is something like 250 or more characters, I’m more inclined to believe it’s basic protection from all the things that can go wrong when someone repeatedly POSTs whatever the maximum amount of garbage that your server’s request limit allows, at an API that performs cryptographic work.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago
      • Do not block common passwords

      Do you mean “not blocking common passwords”?

      This implies that I can totally use “password1”

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        I copied the list straight from the article, so excuse the awkward phrasing. But yes, the implication is that you could totally use “password1” on some websites.

  • gregorum
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    541 year ago

    Largest study ever confirms something everyone has always known

      • fakeaustinfloyd
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        11 year ago

        It is possible that you have a bad infosec team; however, it is more likely that they need to meet outdated compliance goals (SOC 2 comes to mind here).

        Infosec is unfortunately a tricky balancing act of compliance, security, and usability.

  • Dem Bosain
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    231 year ago

    I am tired of websites imposing limitations on passwords, but not sharing what those are. I use a password generator, and rarely know if Unicode characters are allowed, if there’s a limit on the number of characters, etc.

    I’ve come across websites where dashes “-” are forbidden. My banking website only allows a maximum of 16 characters. Sometimes there’s a note below the password box, sometimes they don’t tell you until your password fails, and sometimes they don’t ever tell you. If I don’t know what the restrictions are, I’ll end up throwing a cheap password at it until I can find out what’s acceptable.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      Sometimes the limits they tell you are wrong. Sometimes they truncate your password without telling you. Sometimes the app has different requirements than the website.

    • Altima NEO
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      41 year ago

      Sometimes they change the requirements, so a password that once had symbols no longer works, and you can’t log in anymore.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Even better! They’ll sometimes tell you the wrong error message like my bank used to before they redesigned the front end and backend. I couldn’t change my password there for the longest time because it kept telling me my password was not between 5-8 characters long (yes it was). Turns out I couldn’t use a - in my password. I’m glad they finally updated to to a longer password but I still can’t use a - in my password.

    • @GrunerAffe
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      31 year ago

      Banking having the incredibly low character max is insane. I made a new account recently and I wanted to use the Bitwarden passphrase generation, but even 2 words could make it too long. Plus the push for 2 factor auth with everything including crap like streaming, except they just want to email me after I’ve given my very strong passwords already…

  • @[email protected]
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    81 year ago

    Just string a a few random words together, L337 up a few of them, tack on a random number or two, and throw in a punctuation mark somewhere. Then write them down in a little physical notebook.