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.
The actual funny (or sad) thing about this: even without a length limit all they do is make the password less secure because every constraint just reduces the possible password space.
As someone who generates every password with a password manager those sites are a pain in the ass because you have to somehow get these constraints into the generator.
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
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
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.
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.
The actual funny (or sad) thing about this: even without a length limit all they do is make the password less secure because every constraint just reduces the possible password space.
As someone who generates every password with a password manager those sites are a pain in the ass because you have to somehow get these constraints into the generator.
Keepass deals with this fairly well. It remembers the restrictions from the previous password.
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:
arbitrary_list_of_bsMy 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