this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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The article focuses on password requirements that websites implement, not user behaviors. Common bad practices mentioned:
Complex characters are outdated?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?
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.
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.
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.
Bitwarden is the way
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
Damn you my go-to password in the 2010's was "P4nc4kes!".
A character that extends outside the real number line
My characters extends outside time and space.
Make for very secure passwords.
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
Either you or I got wooshed, cause I thought that was a maths joke, not actually an answer.
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
I think enforcing complex characters is outdated.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!
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.