Small rant incomming. I just went to look at applying to Walmart, and when going to make an account their password requirements were 8-11 characters. What kinda nonsense is that? Some terribly made backend I’d assume. It’s bad enough I gotta make a million accounts when applying to jobs but then you got my PII sitting behind such terrible password requirements it makes me wonder where else they are cutting corners on security.
You’re absolutely right.
A worse example, pharmacy.amazon.com only uses a 4-digit passcode to log in, and it’s a pharmacy site!
If you allow unlimited length inputs of any kind, someone will break your system. 11 is way too short. But you do need some sort of maximum, even if it is very large.
If you’re storing the password in the form the user entered it, you’re doing it wrong already.
Even if you aren’t storing it, if you allow unlimited length someone will break your stuff.
All stored passwords should be salted and hashed. That means each one uses the same amount of space, regardless of original length.
There should definitely be a minimum length but not a maximum (within limits; let’s not break web standards or the laws of thermodynamics).
but not a maximum
well if there is, at least be glad when they tell you. i once met a system that let you enter whatever, and then just ignored anything behind nth (where n was ~10) character…
Oh, let me tell you about Playstation that I had the pleasure of having to deal with it.
I needed to log in to my Playstation account but it told me that my username or password was wrong. Okay, send me a reset link. I got the link and set my new password.
I use Bitwarden and my password generator is set to 32 characters by default.
I generate a new password, paste that into the new password field, click okay and everything is fine, password changed. I save that new password in my vault and go back to the login site. I use the just changed credentials: Wrong username or password.
Well, turns out that the Password reset field is limited to 30 characters but the problem is that NOWHERE is it stated that your password has a max length. Not to mention that they don’t tell you that your password was modified and cut short. The login password field, however, does allow more than 30 characters.
This means that you generate a 32-character password and paste that into the password reset field, this then gets cut short to 30 characters, click save and then use the same password on the login, which is 32 characters. This now obviously doesn’t work because those passwords aren’t the same.
Fun times. The worst part is that the first support person just went “Well, everything looks fine on our side. Sucks for you. Goodbye”.
I’ve once had a password that was over 200 characters long. That was in a custom email server where the admin either didn’t know or care about limitations. I mean, if you can have a super long password, then why not. I just kept on going until I felt like it was secure enough.
I used a randomly generated character soup, so there’s no way I’m ever going to memorize that nightmare of a password. Even if I print it on paper and hand to you, there’s a pretty good chance that you wouldn’t be able to type it correctly without restoring to OCR.
I entered a gold tier password for Golden Sun: The Lost Age so I have that shit locked down
At that point why not use key based authentication?
Pastes private key into password box.
you mentioned salting and hashing that reminds me of places that use to put companies on blast for storing passwords in plaintext.
… 8-11 characters.
they wanted to one up their retail competitor 7-11, maybe?
… 8-11 characters.
shouldn’t be a problem. take the dwarves and Snow White as a minimum. throw in the evil stepmom, woodsman, and magic mirror if you need them.
There needs to be a law to forbid passwords not providing 64 character max
Why stop there? 128 or 256 sound much nicer. Actually, while you’re at it, 4096 should be enough to fit a short story.
There are use cases where long passwords could be problematic. 64 would be long enough for most purposes, but short enough not to cause issues for things like microcontrollers.
It should be paired with a strongly recommended larger value, however.
The new NIST recommendations give a recommendation of at least a 64 character maximum.
Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD permit a maximum password length of at least 64 characters.
I use my password manager to generate 32 character or 64 character passwords whenever possible.
That’s actually a good part of why I trust cryptocurrency over my bank because my bank has all sorts of personally identifiable information and stupid short password requirements where cryptocurrency has no personally identifiable information and seeds are extremely long and complex.
