I hate that anyone has to be told not to truncate passwords. Like even if you haven’t had any training at all, you’d have to be advanced stupid to even come up with that idea in the first place.
Comment on NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 days ago
Reworded rules for clarity:
- Min required length must be 8 chars (obligatory), but it should be 15 chars (recommended).
- Max length should allow at least 64 chars.
- You should accept all ASCII plus space.
- You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
- Don’t demand composition rules (e.g. “u’re password requires a comma! lol lmao haha” tier idiocy)
- Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
- Don’t store password hints that others can guess.
- Don’t prompt the user to use knowledge-based authentication.
- Don’t truncate passwords for verification.
I was expecting idiotic rules screaming “bureaucratic muppets don’t know what they’re legislating on”, but instead what I’m seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible.
catloaf@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Amanduh@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Can you elaborate further? Why would someone want to truncate passwords to begin with?
essteeyou@lemmy.world 2 days ago
To save a few megabytes of text in a database somewhere. Likely the same database that gets hacked.
frezik@midwest.social 1 day ago
Lots of older databases had fixed length fields, and you had to pad it if it was smaller.
VARCHARis a relatively new thing. So it’s not just saving space, but that old databases tended to force the issue.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
This is a big one. Especially in corporate environments where most of the users are, shall we say, not tech savvy. Forcing people to comply with byzantine incomprehensible password composition rules plus insisting that they change their password to a new inscrutable string that looks like somebody sneezed in punctuation marks accomplishes nothing other than enticing everyone to just write their password down on a Post-It and stick it to their monitor or under their keyboard.
Remember: Users do not care about passwords. From the perspective of anyone who isn’t a programmer or a security expert, passwords are just yet another exasperating roadblock some nerd put in front of the user that is preventing them from doing whatever it is they were actually trying to do.
Starbuncle@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Everyone I’ve spoken to who has a password change rule just changes one character from their previous password. It does NOTHING.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That works great until some dickhole implements the old, “New password cannot contain any sequence from your previous (5) passwords.”
This also of course necessitates storing (multiple successive!) passwords in plain text or with a reversible cipher, which is another stupid move. You’d think we’d have gotten all of this out of our collective system as a society by now, and yet I still see it all the time.
All of these schemes are just security theater, and actively make the system in question less secure while accomplishing nothing other than berating and frustrating its users.
dgmib@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This also leads to stupid rules like you can change your password more than once a day, to prevent someone from changing their password 5 times and then changing it back to what it was before.
Starbuncle@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
HA, I hope you’re joking. Surely nobody’s actually done that, right? …Riiiight?
Flying_Hellfish@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“I just increment the number at the ens” is a phrase I’ve heard so many times
MajorHavoc@programming.dev 2 days ago
- Don’t truncate passwords for verification.
It needed to be said. Because some password system architects have been just that stupid.
Dhs92@programming.dev 2 days ago
I’ve seen sites truncate when setting, but not on checking. So you set a password on a site with no stated limit, go to use said password, and get locked out. It’s infuriating
Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sounds like my bank.
orclev@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Banks usually have the absolute worst password policies. It’s typically because their backend is some crusty mainframe from the 80s that limits inputs to something absurdly insecure by today’s standards and they’ve kicked the upgrade can down the road for so long now that it’s a staggeringly monumental task to rewrite it all. Thankfully most of them have upgraded at this point, but every now and then you still find one that’s got ridiculous limits like a maximum password length of 8 and only alphanumeric characters (with no 2FA obviously).
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Another ridiculous policy I’ve seen (many years ago) is logging in too fast. I used to get locked out of my banks website all the time and I used autotype with KeePass so I was baffled when it wouldn’t get accepted. Eventually I had a thought to slow down the typing mechanism and suddenly I didn’t get locked out anymore.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
I was expecting idiotic rules screaming “bureaucratic muppets don’t know what they’re legislating on”, but instead what I’m seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible
NIST knows what they’re doing. It’s getting organizations to adapt that’s hard. NIST has recommended against expiring passwords for like a decade already, for example, yet pretty much every IT dept still has passwords expiring at least once a year.
perviouslyiner@lemmy.world 1 day ago
re #7, I hope they are also saying no ‘secret questions’ to reset the password?
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, I think 7 and 8 both cover that. I recently signed up for an account where all of the “security questions” provided asked about things that could be either looked up or reasonably guessed based on looked up information.
We live in a tech world designed for the technically illiterate.
eronth@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I usually invent answers to those and store those answers in a password manager. Essentially turns them into backup passwords that can be spoken over the phone if necessary.
Where was I born? “Stallheim, EUSA, Mars” Name of first pet? “Groovy Tuesday”
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I tried that without a password manager for a little while. But then my answers were too abstract to remember, so now I also use a password manager for that.
subtext@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What is the first name of your first best friend?
eoY&Z9m4LNRDY!Gzdd%q98LYiBi8Nq
Oh old eoY&Z9m4LNRDY!Gzdd%q98LYiBi8Nq and I go way back! I met eoY&Z9m4LNRDY!Gzdd%q98LYiBi8Nq in Pre-K and we’ve been inseparable ever since.
It is quite annoying if they’re a service that makes you read aloud your security questions to phone reps to prove your identity. One of my retirement accounts requires that and I have to sigh and read out the full string. I’ve changed it since to an all lowercase, 20 digit string as a compromise.
frezik@midwest.social 1 day ago
Sarah Palin had her Yahoo mail account hacked because of those “security” questions. In 2008. We should be well past the time where they are a thing.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Q: What do you often see when you look out your back window?
A: Vladimir Putin riding a horse shirtless.
Hey maybe the GOP got connected with Putin because he was often at Palin’s backyard BBQs when he would ride over to say hi when he saw the gathering.
Though I also just noticed there’s only two letters different between Putin and Palin… Maybe it was just Putin in a wig the whole time.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
I think so, based on the original: “Verifiers and CSPs [credential service providers] SHALL NOT permit the subscriber to store a hint that is accessible to an unauthenticated claimant.” With “shall not” being used for hard prohibitions.
Tanoh@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Only issue I see is that the 8 chars required is very short and easy to brute force. You would hope that people would go for the recommended instead, but doubt it.
cybersandwich@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think if you do allow 8 character passwords the only stipulation is that you check it against known compromised password lists. Again, pretty reasonable.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
That stipulation goes rather close to #5, even not being a composition rule.
I think that a better approach is to follow the recommended min length (15 chars), unless there are good reasons to lower it and you’re reasonably sure that your delay between failed password attempts works flawlessly.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
Hmm. I wonder about this one. Different ways to encode the same character. Different ways to calculate the length. No obvious max byte size.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Who cares? It’s going to be hashed anyway. If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash. If another user can’t generate the same input, well, that’s really rather the point. And I can’t think of a single backend, language, or framework that doesn’t treat a single Unicode character as one character. Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you’re not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.
frezik@midwest.social 1 day ago
It matters for bcrypt/scrypt. They have a 72 byte limit. Not characters, bytes.
That said, I also think it doesn’t matter much. Reasonable length passphrases that could be covered by the old Latin-1 charset can easily fit in that. If you’re talking about KJC languages, then each character is actually a whole word, and you’re packing a lot of entropy into one character. 72 bytes is already beyond what’s needed for security; it’s diminishing returns at that point.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash.
Yes, if. I don’t know if you can guarantee that. It’s all fun and games as long as you’re doing English. In other languages, you get characters that can be encoded in more than 1 way. User at home has a localized keyboard with a dedicated key for such a character. User travels across the border and has a different language keyboard and uses a different way to create the character. Euro problems.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence
Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you’re not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.
There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.
- John F. Kennedy
turtle@lemm.ee 1 day ago
It’s crazy that they didn’t include all the “should” items in that list. If you read the entire section, there’s a critical element that’s missing in the list, which is that new passwords should be checked against blocklists. Otherwise, if you combine 1, 5, and 6, you end up with people using “password” as their password, and keeping that forever. Really, really poor organization on their part. I’m already fighting this at work.
tastysnacks@programming.dev 2 days ago
What kind of barbarian puts a space in their password?
naticus@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Very common for pass phrases, and not dissuaded. Pass phrases are good for people to remember without using poor storage practices (post it notes, txt file, etc) and are strong enough to keep secure against brute force attacks or just guessing based off knowledge of the user.
grue@lemmy.world 2 days ago
On one hand, that’s true. On the other hand, a person should only need exactly one passphrase, which is the one used to unlock their password manager. Every other password should be randomly-generated and would only contain space characters by chance.
naticus@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s great in theory, but you’ll have passwords for logging into OSes too which password managers do not help with and you better have it memorized or you’re going to have a bad time.
lol_idk@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
I’m waiting for backspace to be a valid character
lol_idk@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Also there’s the no space space. But that’s really only useful in hacking bad implementations of html parsers or putting in your code you post online to mess with people.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s the “zero width space,” Alt + 200B for Windows users. Another favorite of mine is the nonbreaking space, Alt + 0160, which a staggering majority of web sites and other systems fail to account for.
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
gosh who would want an uncommon character that obviously most average people aren’t thinking about in their passwords, that sounds like it might even be somewhat secure.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
hunter 2unhackable
randombullet@programming.dev 2 days ago
My passphrase includes several spaces. It’s another character to assist in entropy.
portifornia@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m with you, despite seeing lemmings downvote the heck out of your comment 😢
The reason, and specifically for whitespace at the beginning or end of a password, is that a lot of users copy-paste their passwords into the form, and for various reasons, whitespace can get pasted in, causing an invalid match. No bueno.
Source: I’m a web developer who has seen this enough times that we had to implement a whitespace-trim validation for both setting & entering passwords.
orclev@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Trimming whitespace from the start and end of a password is fine but you absolutely should not remove whitespace from the middle of a password.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think it’s pretty idiotic to
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords.
They might mean well, but the reason we require a special character and number is to ensure the amount of possible characters are increased.
If a website doesn’t enforce it, people are just going to do a password like password
password is a totally valid password under this rule. Any 8 letter word is valid. hopsital for example.
These passwords can be cracked in seconds, and have their hashes checked for in leaks in no time.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
They might mean well, but the reason we require a special character and number is to ensure the amount of possible characters are increased.
The problem with this sort of requirement is that most people will solve it the laziest way. In this case, “ah, I can’t use «hospital»? Mkay, «Hospital1» it is! Yay it’s accepted!”. And then there’s zero additional entropy - because the first char still has 26 states, and the additional char has one state.
Someone could of course “solve” this by inserting even further rules, like “you must have at least one number and one capital letter inside the password”, but then you get users annotating the password in a .txt file because it’s too hard to remember where they capitalised it or did their 1337.
Instead just skip all those silly rules. If offline attacks are such a concern, increase the min pass length. Using both lengths provided by the guidelines:
- 8 chars, mixing:minuscules, capitals, digits, and any 20 special chars of your choice, for a total of 82 states per char. 82⁸ = 2*10¹⁵ states per password.
- 15 chars, using only minuscules, for a total of 26 states per char. Number of states: 26¹⁵ = 1.7*10²¹ states per password.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 day ago
But they mess that up with their 8 char rule
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.
I’d they’d just said shall require 15 but not require special chars then that’s okay, but they didn’t.
Then you end up with the typical shitty manager who sees this, and says they recommend 8 and no special chars, and that’s what it becomes.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
I don’t think that the entity should be blamed for the shitty manager. Specially given that the document has a full section (appendix A.2) talking about pass length.
frezik@midwest.social 2 days ago
NIST generally knows what they’re doing. Want to overwrite a hard drive securely? NIST 800-88 has you covered. Need a competition for a new block cipher? NIST ran that and AES came out of it. Same for a new hash with SHA3.
grue@lemmy.world 2 days ago
For now, at least. Could change after Inauguration Day.
M500@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Didn’t know about sha3.