Last week, I tried to register for a service and was really surprised by a password limit of 16 characters. Why on earth yould you impose such strict limits? Never heard of correct horse battery staple?
This is my biggest pet peeve. Password policies are largely mired in inaccurate conventional wisdom, even though we have good guidance docs from NIST on this.
Frustrating poor policy configs aside, this max length is a huge red flag, basically they are admitting that they store your password in plan text and aren’t hashing like they should be.
If a company tells you your password has a maximum length, they are untrustable with anything important.
Oh I had the same thought. Whoever limits password length probably has many other shitty security practices.
If a company tells you your password has a maximum length, they are untrustable with anything important.
Lemmy-UI has a password limit of 60 characters. Does that make it untrustworthy?
OWASP recommendation is to allow 64 chars at least:
Maximum password length should be at least 64 characters to allow passphrases (NIST SP800-63B). Note that certain implementations of hashing algorithms may cause long password denial of service.
The lemmy-UI limit is reasonably close and as everything is open source, we can verifiy that it does hash the password before storing it in the database.
There is a github issue, too.
It being open source helps because we can confirm it’s not being mishandled, but it’s generally arbitrary to enforce password max lengths beyond avoiding malicious bandwidth or compute usage in extreme cases.
If a company tells you your password has a maximumn length, they are untrustable with anything important.
I would add if they require a short "maximum length." There's no reason to allow someone to use the entirety of Moby Dick as their password, so a reasonable limit can be set. That's not 16 characters, but you probably don't need to accept more than 1024 anyway.
The number of government websites that I’ve encountered with this “limitation.” Even more frustrating when it’s not described upfront in the parameters or just results in an uncaught error that reloads the page with no error message.
bcrypt has a maximum password length of 56 to 72 bytes and while it's not today's preferred algo for new stuff, it's still completely fine and widely used.
I had to make an account the other day with the absolute worst password requirements I've ever seen:
Do you know the password game?
The digits in your password must add up to 25.
Yeah but the stakes are higher in Jersey you can get fined or even jail for messing up that password.
When I was working on a password system a few years ago, I found some amazingly bad password requirements. One that stuck with me was it couldn't contain any two digit years (e.g. 08).
I'll also leave this here: https://dumbpasswordrules.com/sites-list/
The worst is when it either won't tell you what the character limit is so you have to just keep lowering it and retrying until it finally works, or when the infrastructure for signing up has a different character limit than the infrastructure for logging in, so you can sign up with a long password but can't actually sign in with it. I once encountered a website that had this issue for both the password AND username so I had to change my password and then contact support to change my username. Absurd.
I used to manage a system that had a longer character limit on the creation than in the sign in. To fix it, they just let you type in more characters when you signed in but only validated the first 8 anyway. 🤦♂️
Honestly at that point, it's not worth using the service to me if I have to contact support just to sign in.
I know a bank with a 12 character max, no symbols password restriction.
Ridiculous
Mine does not allow spaces. They used to use a 4 digit pin as 2FA. Not a new pin you got every time you logged in, the same 4 digit pin.
A lot of bank computing is a complete clusterf@#k. Getting even basic changes and bug fixes requires it being signed off on by various regulators and committees. Apparently, 18 months for a 1 line change is normal. This has ended up with layers of new work being frankensteined onto older systems. E.g. Internet banking, for a long time, physically printed checks, via an automated machine, posted them, and then had them read in, via an automated machine. Hence why Internet bank transfers took 2-3 days.
I had issues with my banks truncating my password a while back. It only looked at the first 8 characters.
One of my past banks used to be case-insensitive. They aren't anymore (as far as I know). Their name starts with Key and ends with Bank.
A prominent Australian bank has these requirements:
For Internet Banking, your password must be six to eight characters long.
To improve security, it should:
contain both numbers and letters.
include upper and lower-case letters (your password is case sensitive).
8 character max means they're running it on a mainframe I think, though I don't know enough about mainframes to know if this is a normal level of bad or really bad
Its even better when they don't tell you that your password is too long, and they truncate it somewhere unknown.
Tried a randomgen 32 character password at the local sheriff's office. Copy and pasted it directly out of my password manager into the password creation field so I know I didn't typo it and when I tried to login it wouldn't work. Took me a bit of troubleshooting to figure out what happened.
worst i've seen is 8 characters. precisely 8 characters, no more no less........ it was for a bank ....
A major US bank that I used to use has case insensitive passwords, found that out one day when I noticed caps lock was on after logging in with no trouble
I got this from a bank. A BANK. Not only was it limited to 12 characters. THEY ALSO LIMITED THE SPECIAL CHARACTER SET.
I complained and was told, oh that's why we have the security number for (a unchanging six digit code), and I'm like, that's basically 1 password with 18 character limit and 6 of the characters are definitely numbers.
Not only that, 2FA is not available for logon, it just says "to authenticate certain types of Internet and Mobile Banking transactions".
I couldn't believe it. Surprise, surprise, there are no minimum password security regulations in Australia...
"correct horse battery staple" is for your password manager password. The regular passwords for services should be random character gibberish.
Edit: to be clear, though, I'm not excusing their failure to allow >16 characters of gibberish.
Eons ago, I got an account for using a software on an IBM mainframe. Keep in mind that the machine used masks with fixed-width text fields on the terminal (TN3270, IIRC), even for the login mask. Being security cautious, the first thing I did after login was to change my password. The "change password" mask allowed for passwords of up to 12 characters, which I used freely. I logged out, got back to the login mask - which only allowed for an eight character password...
ADD FIELD PASSWORD VARCHAR(16)
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = "$name" OR password = "$password"
No need to escape, if the table name for ; drop table ... -- doesn't fit 😉
Tell me about it. USAA has a password policy of "between 8 and 12 characters."
Like, that's not even secure under old understandings of secure. A max of 12 should be, like, an actual offense with sanctions attached if they get hacked at some point. Especially for a financial institution. Ridiculous.
Definitely used a one-off password for that one...
My current employer has the dumbest restrictions for passwords to our core system. It is a large regional bank. Our core system must have a password that is either 7 or 8 characters long (nothing shorter or longer). It cannot have any vowels or special characters. It cannot have any capital letters. It cannot have two numbers in a row.
Fuck this! My bank has this, and not just that, the limit is 6 digits, that's right, only digits and only 6 of them.
My balance is harder to guess than my password (if you include cents)
Fuck!
I used to have to use a government-run website that required passwords to be exactly 8 characters
The answer is always a poorly coded database. :(
What? The password should only receive the hashed password, and that's gonna have a fixed length. What's stored in the db should have the exact same length whether the password is 2 characters long or 300. If the length of the password is in any way a consideration for your database, you've royally fucked up long before you got to that point.
"Your password may not contain any quotes or backslashes"
This one time I got this catch22 situation with a service.. Turned out password reset in the Android app accepted 32 characters but in the browser less.
My favorite was "Your password must begin with a letter"
"Otherwise our database may misinterpret it as a number when we store it in pain text"
pain text
Accidentally accurate
Here is a screenshot from the page where my meme came from. But it it not the only company out there with ridiculous password policies.
Only the hottest memes in Cybersecurity
