What is your favourite password rule?

  • Dem Bosain@midwest.social
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    8 months ago

    I just had to make a password for a hotel.

    8 to 20 characters Uppercase Lowercase Digits OR special characters.

    The capitalized OR is important. You can have either numbers in the password, or special characters, BUT NOT BOTH.

    Took me 8 tries.

    • First one was too long.
    • Second and third used both numbers and characters, but I thought the characters were TOO special.
    • 4 through 6 used both numbers and special characters.
    • Seventh password used just letters and numbers, and it was accepted.
    • Eighth try I used just letters and keyboard characters, and that was accepted too.
    • Sewer_King@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The best part to me is that they include all of these rules to increase the security, but then set a maximum length of the password, which from my understanding is the easiest way to add complexity/security to a password.

      • felbane@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Maximum length is the biggest red flag to me and was the catalyst for me making the effort to switch to unique passwords per-account years ago. There’s just so, so many shitty homerolled security systems out there… and data breaches seem to be a perennial problem these days.

        There’s just no excuse for limiting the length if you’re doing security correctly (other than perhaps a large upper limit just to protect against someone DOSing the backend with a bunch of 100MB strings; 512 characters seems reasonable).

        By setting an upper limit, you’re basically saying one or more of these things:

        • We store your password in plaintext
        • We store a hash but our hashing function has an unnecessarily arbitrarily limited input size
        • The person/team implementing the backend has no idea what they’re doing and/or just copy pasted login code from stack overflow
        • We tried to get away with minimal password requirements but some middle manager wouldn’t rubber stamp it without arbitrary_list_of_bs
        • pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          8 months ago

          My senior project for uni was replacing the professor’s friend’s website. We had a meeting to gather requirements, have him demo the site as different kinds of users, etc. Dude said “Hold on a sec” and went to a page with all accounts and their passwords listed. Was like, dude, the hell