Obligatory https://neal.fun/password-game/
Nooo! The fireeee! This would be better with a physical keyboard.
Link for compatibilityMy final password was: Pass5@JulyXXXV+Shell+n2by7+droop+🌚+Peru+2020+Qd7+🥚+Zn+BBBBB
The hardest 2 were chess and guessing the country. Maybe atomic numbers with combination with roman numerals, but that’s sorta fine.
That’s where I got derailed on my best run. Chess was easy the first time and maddening the next two.
Well, that’ll teach you to actually take care of your pets and not just dump their food in front of them and be done with it.
(fuck paul tho fr)
Ah I was just copying the URL to post the same thing. It’s such a fun game to go through, although I gave up pretty quickly
Tried it again, made it to the chess step
Use lichess.org’s board editor
You’re telling me I didn’t need to use my brain?
You’re on programmer humor, we don’t do “Brain” here.
There was a website where I was making an account and it was like: no semicolons.
To this day I wonder if that was how they blocked sql injection.
Escaping by obstruction ^^
The right answer is use a password manager to generate and store a long password. Then it doesn’t matter.
Best practice in 2023 is a simple, sufficiently long but memorable passphrase. Excessive requirements mean users just create weak passwords with patterns.
[Capital letter]basic word(number){special character}Enforcing password changes doesnt help either. It just creates further patterns. The vast majority of compromised credentials are used immediately or within a short time frame anyway. Changing the password 2 months later isnt going to help and passwords like July2023!, which are common, are weak to begin with.
A non expiring, long, easily remembered passphase like
forgetting-spaghetti-toad-box
Is much more secure than a short password with enforced complexity requirements.Drop “memorable”. 99.9% of your passwords should be managed by your password manager and don’t need to be memorized. On one or two passwords that you actually need to type (like your computer login) need to be memorable.
99.9% of your passwords should be managed by your password manager
this looks like a sensible approach until you remember password managers can be cracked, too. I’m with GP on this, a passphrase is easier to remember and is good enough for most use cases, if you need more security you should be using some form or another of 2FA anyway
I am kinda paranoid about password managers. My passwords are stored somewhere on the computer, all of them, and I don’t like that idea. I can exercise my brain.
I’ve got 1601 logins and 86 secure notes in my Bitwarden vault… no way I’m memorizing all of that lol
I have 350 items in my BW vault. I am not memorizing that many passwords, I’d rather use my brain for something else.
I’ve been using keepassxc for a while now and it’s better than most other options, everything is stored locally and encrypted behind a master password.
All you micht want to do is make a backup of your vault onto an external drive (best practice would be encrypted via the options you have, I use luks because I’m a Linux nerd).
Agreed. Have my password database backed up over multiple places, GPG encrypted of-coarse, you can never be too safe.
forgetting-spaghetti-toad-box
I don’t know much about PW security but would a passphrase of common words not be more susceptible to dictionary attacks?
The idea is that entropy is measured with possible words instead of possible characters. It turns out 7 7-bit ascii characters have less entropy than 4 14-bit equivalent words (that is, the 16,384 most common ones). And that’s in the ideal case it’s a totally random 7 characters.
Every attack is technically a dictionary attack here, but it doesn’t help enough because the password to a computer is still 30 characters long. To a human it seems a lot easier than ")f1:.{yJCzNv]@R=S K$~= ", though.
PS. Turning /dev/random output into 7-bit ascii characters is surprisingly involved in Haskell. C would have been easier. This was the world’s slowest ninja edit.
Thanks for the explanation, I remember the explanation in https://xkcd.com/936/ but wasn’t sure how that held up for different attack methods.
Infuriating fact: if a service has maximum password length limits (lower than 1000 characters), they’re reversibly storing your password and if they’re that lazy it’s probably plain text
reversibly?
Yeah, you actually better not save the users passwords in plain text or in an encrypted way it could be decrypted. You rather save a (salted) hashed string of the password. When a user logs in you compare the hashed value of the password the user typed in against the hashed value in your database.
What is hashed? Think of it like a crossfoot of a number:
Let’s say you have a number 69: It’s crossfoot is (6+9) 15. But if someone steals this crossfoot they can’t know the original number it’s coming from. It could be 78 or 87.
i was more wondering why a length limit implies anything about how they’re storing the password. once they receive the password they’re free to hash it any which way they want
random memory—yahoo back in the day used to hash the password in the browser before sending it to the server, but TLS made that unnecessary i guess
Dumb question: isn’t it irrelevant for the malicous party if it’s 78 or 87 per your example, because the login only checks the hash anyway? Won’t both numbers succesfully login?
It’s actually a really good question. What you’re explaining is called a collision, by creating the same hash with different numbers you can succesfully login.
This why some standard hashing function become deprecated and are replaced when someone finds a collision. MD5, which was used a lot to hash passwords or files, is considered insecure because of all the collisions people could find.
Couldn’t it just be that they’re using something like bcrypt which won’t take any chars above its limit into account (knowing that there’s a limit will pretty much never matter to a user but why obscure the fact)? What does it even mean to store it reversibly, just because they have a char limit doesn’t mean they are encrypting the password, could just be some frontend shenannigans as well.
They may just base their limit on one or a few block sizes of the hash function.
Nope. No point in storing > 256 or even 128 chars for a password anyway. Useless storage wasted. Also it doesn’t really mean they store the password badly in the server.
A hashed password is always the same length though is it not?
The length limit is mostly for the user’s sake - companies don’t want people to set their passwords to 30+ character ones that they keep forgetting and call their tech support to reset.
That’s really really really annoying, as someone who has a good, strong brain-based password algorithm and hates it when websites forbid my strong password forcing me to make an exception.
Ok but are 15 characters too much?
I’ve seen 14-char limits, which are NOT reasonable
there is at least one bank that I know of with a 12 character limit
There’s a major bank in Australia that limited passwords to six characters. Exactly six. No more, no less. The passwords were also case-insensitive.
Yikes, how do banks, of all things, have such low password limits…
Ignoring that they must be hashed to be acceptable and that it’s not possible for 1000 characters of text to add up to a waste of storage worth mentioning in pretty much any environment, it’s literally impossible for a 128 character password limit to be beneficial in any way.
A limit below that demonstrably lowers security by a huge margin.
“password must contain a PUA codepoint”
password is already in use
No way that’s an actual security threat, right?
“Password is already used by user
potatoeater420, please choose a different password.”The only security threat would be the site itself. How do they know other users have the same password?
Options:
-
They have your password in plain text in their DB. CHEFF KISS
-
They aren’t using salts.
-
They are using the same salt for everyone.
All of them concerning.
-
Knowing that it’s already in use is.
Basically all of these constraints are bad practice, though. It’s obviously better to have a long, complex password, and not to reuse passwords between sites, but if you make shit impossible for people to remember they’re going to write it down, and a lot of people don’t use password managers (or use shared devices where they aren’t possible).
Length limits (that aren’t like 1000 characters) are unconditionally terrible practice. It means your password is probably plain text, because hashes don’t really care or take meaningfully longer based on the length of the input.
A string of (random) words is a perfectly fine password. There’s an xkcd I’m too lazy to get demonstrating it, but it genuinely does add enough randomness to break brute force.
A string of (random) words is a perfectly fine password. There’s an xkcd I’m too lazy to get demonstrating it, but it genuinely does add enough randomness to break brute force.
Here’s the xkcd.
I don’t get why some sites limit your usage of special characters and have miniscule max lengths?? looking at you PayPal you piece of shit
“This password would take 1 century to crack!”
Does anyone use the generator from chrome anymore? Like a 2023 password for me is “suggest strong password”…
Fuck that shit, just give me the password
Then, please give us your phone number for 2fa, instead of letting you use a more secure app
This is a repost :)
Are we really starting this shit here?
Everything on the internet is a repost. Calling it out adds nothing worthwhile to the conversation and just derails any conversation.
Yeah but when you see the same 5 posts every month it gets tiring. If the other post was in a different place though, then it’s not a repost
If I’ve ever seen the same post 5 times, it was in a day or two and it was a new and exciting thing for some people so everybody would post it and the same time.
And?
More like an unofficial cross-post. OP posted both of them
I dont know how to make a crosspost in the app
