1y ago

Largest Study of its Kind Shows Outdated Password Practices are Widespread

www.cc.gatech.edu

Largest Study of its Kind Shows Outdated Password Practices are Widespread | College of Computing

"More than half of the websites in the study accepted passwords with six characters or less, with 75% failing to require the recommended eight-character minimum. Around 12% of had no length requirements, and 30% did not support spaces or special characters."

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1y ago

Largest Study of its Kind Shows Outdated Password Practices are Widespread

www.cc.gatech.edu /news/largest-study-its-kind-shows-outdated-password-practices-are-widespread

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1y ago

Largest Study of Its Kind Shows Outdated Password Practices Are Widespread

www.cc.gatech.edu /news/largest-study-its-kind-shows-outdated-password-practices-are-widespread

20 comments

It's 2023 and I still see signup forms that are like "must have at least one of each: number, lowercase letter, uppercase character, special character (but not , . " & / + < > {} [] )"
That, plus no single sign-on (privacy issues aside) and login flow design so bad that password managers don't know what the fuck is going on, and it's no wonder password security is still a huge issue.
- My old domain registrar set an 7 character limit, no special characters of any kind. Just numbers and letters. This was back in 2020 🫠

not even mentioning websites that have something like a 20 character limit on passwords
- My favourites are the ones that let you set a 35-character password and, presumably, happily hash it and store it in the database, but then provide a login screen that requires passwords to be 20 characters or less.
  
  My HP printer had a hard limit of 16 characters. My password manager generated 20 characters. The login form had no issue accepting 20 characters, which were of course wrong.
  Just another reason to not buy HP I guess
- One of the worst offenders I've seen was a bank I used to use. I think they limited to 16 characters and also got angry about a couple different special characters I tried to use. The problem beyond that? The form would let you submit any length and just silently chopped off characters 17+ or whatever. I had to reset my password several times to figure out what was going on. Pathetic...
  
  I've seen this, wtf does this people have on their heads!?
- I was under the impression that even just letters (no case) would take a lifetimes to brute force if you exceeded 15 characters. And that drops to just 11 if you mix cases, numbers and special characters.
  
  That's probably about correct, horse battery staple.
- Earlier this year I signed up as a member to a professional organization that also grants IT-related certifications... I couldn't figure out why the account registration wouldn't let me proceed, until I typed a super short password instead.

Cool now talk about how shitty banks block auto-fill on their login forms which keeps you from using it with your password managers. Oh, and no, you can't paste into those fields either cuz "security".
- At least on Firefox, there's a flag you can change in the browser settings to make it so nobody can disable pasting to text fields. It has made the banking experience a lot more pleasant for me. https://www.howtogeek.com/251807/how-to-enable-pasting-text-on-sites-that-block-it/

If a website requires so few characters that I have to create custom rule in my password manager for it... then it's a website I'm strongly inclined not to use.
Sadly, a lot of these websites deal with finances or employment.
- Paypal lol. Literally my most insecure password
  
  you know what's funny. in paypal you are not even allowed to make a secure password. they have a short character limit.

I've come across a few sites that require one upper case, one number and one symbol (from a short list). Not at least one of each, no no, precisely one of each. One site even forced the password length to be exact -_-

If we could audit individuals' passwords across services, I'll bet the duplicate and weak passwords found would likely be terrifying.

Obligatory: "12345? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!"

20 comments