What is your favourite password rule?

  • Sewer_King@lemmy.world
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    7 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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      7 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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        7 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