Comment on NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 day agoDon’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