Why do so many companies and people say that your password has to be so long and complicated, just to have restrictions?

I am in the process of changing some passwords (I have peen pwnd and it’s the password I use for use-less-er sites) and suddenly they say “password may contain a maximum of 15 characters“… I mean, 15 is long but it’s nothing for a password manager.

And then there’s the problem with special characters like äàáâæãåā ñ ī o ė ß ÿ ç just to name a few, or some even won’t let you type a [space] in them. Why is that? Is it bad programming? Or just a symptom of copy-pasta?

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    161·
    1 year ago

    I hope you’re using a password manager, I recommend bit warden if not.

    Password requirements are all attempts at getting people to introduce entropy into their passwords. The length the characters the not allowed characters the allowed characters. All about adding entropy

    Restrictions on allowed characters tend to be based on legacy systems and the input state allow. So if you have an input system that only has Latin characters, it would be foolish to allow non-Latin characters into a password, because then people could get stuck unable to login. So typically they reduce to the safest set of characters that all of their systems use. And for some of the older systems that parse passwords, some of the Meta characters could be problematic.

    Password length is also down to legacy systems. If you have an old school Solaris system somewhere in your back end, that truncates password fields at 15 characters. Then 15 characters is the max.

      • janAkali@lemmy.oneEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        While most of the time, I remember my password, I know I could just snap and forget it right there at any point. Happened to me not once. And I’m in my 20s. Sometimes when I forget a password, I just start typing and muscle memory kicks in, sometimes it doesn’t. I guess our brains are not optimized to store long random strings of characters. You could use a long sentence as your master password or do as I do:

        Come up with a way to make up a long seemingly random password from a couple words. Then if/when you forget a password, just remember those words and reconstruct password from them.

        • Don’t use common dictionary words or anything from popular media, as it could be guessed by attackers.
        • You can write down algorithm on a piece of paper and keep it somewhere safe.
        • Words should be related but not directly:
          • two asteroid names - bad
          • asteroid name and it’s greek translation - bad
          • real city name and city name from a book - good
          • two words that both start with S and end with T - good
        • If you forget both words, you should be able to remember/look up at least one of them if you still remember how you came up with the word.
    • asudox@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      I agree. Bitwarden is open source and also provides a pretty good user experience. Now that passkey support is also coming, I like it even more. Currently a premium member. 10€/year isn’t alot for a good service.

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Plus you can self host if you want the save the $10 a year, but its worth it to support the ecosystem

        • asudox@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 year ago

          Yes. Exactly. I don’t know why anyone would prefer anything else over Bitwarden if they want a online password manager.

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
      3·
      1 year ago

      It feels like a lot of sites are taking active measures to block the use is password managers, too. I hate those sites. Why I’m the hell would you do that???

        • MagicShel@programming.dev
          4·
          1 year ago

          Mainly financial sites, in my experience. I also have problems logging into Mastodon, because if I manually type my user and password I get logged in but if I use Bitwarden or even copy/paste it fails.

          But also every site where you type in the user name and then submit and it takes you to enter the password - I use a lot of custom emails to avoid spam so I may not remember my username for a given site, but Bitwarden won’t recognize it as a login page (much bigger problem on mobile, which is where I do most of my stuff).

          • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            It’s your browser. You can install JavaScript or a browser extension which disallows the no paste input field. So that you can always paste in.

            The financial institutions that implement that they’re trying to guard against local copy and paste password theft. Any program can have access to the clipboard. So I understand why they do it, and I understand why it’s annoying.

            For financial institutions I highly recommend using something like a Fido 2 key. I’m partial to the yubikey bioseries.

        • jadero@programming.dev
          4·
          1 year ago

          Prairie Centre Credit Union.

          After years of complaining, they finally did something about their hopelessly insecure authentication, only to completely bork it.

          Bitwarden could open the site, but couldn’t push the login info. They prohibited pasting, so I had type everything by hand. And they couldn’t even get that prohibition right, because I discovered that I could type a character then CTRL+V to paste, then HOME, DEL.

          All of that is written past tense, because it was the last straw. I took my banking elsewhere, despite the fact I now have to drive 2.5 hours if I need to talk to someone in person.