One of my coworkers got super into it and got into the high 20s I made an off-hand comment about wondering what it does for rule 34 and he responded "gasp I must know!" Then a couple days later messages me a screenshot on teams. Spoiler: it goes "ehhh let's just skip this rule"
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
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.
That sounds incredibly unlikely. I would be good money that 99% of password length limits are not based on concrete limits. Things like "100 should be enough 🤷" must be way more common.
I doubt 1% of programmers are away of their hashes block size. It is also probably irrelevant since after the first round everything is fixed size anyways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.