We've all been there.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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“Sorry, that password is already in use” ruins it for me. That’s not a realistic message to receive.
Maybe “Your password cannot be one you’ve used previously”.
Should be: "your password cannot be one of your last 24 passwords"
Yeah, this is important. Make it a really big number too so that I have to change my password lots of times in a row in order to put it back to what it was. ;)
Especially for those places that want your password changed every two weeks.
If they want to play that game - the calendar date becomes part of the password. It's never the same, but you can always work it out!
Or just append a letter that increments every time you change your password, and keep a note of what the current letter is.
Passworda
Passwordb
Passwordc
...
When your z password expires, just wrap back around to a.
At my work they wanted better security, and made the rule of minimum 12 characters, must include all sorts of numbers, special characters, etc, no previously used password and it must be changed every month, 3 attempts then the account is locked and you have to call IT.
The result was that people wrote their passwords on post-its on the screen, so it led to worse security overall and they had ro relax the rules.
It follows the vein of some of the password rules and feedback reducing security itself. Like why disallow any characters or set a maximum password length in double digits? If you're storing a hash of the password, the hash function can handle arbitrary length strings filled with arbitrary characters. They run on files, so even null characters need to work. If you do one hash on the client's side and another one on the server, then all the extra computational power needed for a ridiculously long password will be done by the client's computer.
And I bet at least one site has used the error message "that password is already in use by " before someone else in the dev team said, "hang on, what?".
It's true, most of these rules are harmful, but also most are in common use and accepted, for some reason. I have heard of a password system that had that warning, perhaps even the account, but it was in a softwaregore screenshot context.
Should say by who. :)
Now we are talking :)
It shouldn't be.
But it is.