this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Mildly Infuriating

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Just take the string as bytes and hash it ffs

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[–] [email protected] 197 points 2 months ago (7 children)

There’s a special place in hell for those who set an upper limit in password lengths.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I sort of get it. You don't want to allow the entire work of Shakespeare in the text field, even if your database can handle it.

16 characters is too low. I'd say a good upper limit would be 100, maybe 255 if you're feeling generous.

[–] [email protected] 90 points 2 months ago (21 children)

The problem is that you (hopefully) hash the passwords, so they all end up with the same length.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago (2 children)

At minimum you need to limit the request size to avoid DOS attacks and such. But obviously that would be a much larger limit than anyone would use for a password.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

Also rate of the requests. A normal user isn't sending a 1 MiB password every second

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What's a sensible limit. 128 bytes? Maybe 64?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

I'd say 128 is understandable, but something like 256 or higher should be the limit. 64, however, is already bellow my default in bitwarden

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The eBay password limit is 256 characters.

They made the mistake of mentioning this when I went to change my password.

Guess how many characters my eBay password has?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Damn signed bytes!

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Just paste it in here and I count the characters for you.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I sort of get it. You don’t want to allow the entire work of Shakespeare in the text field, even if your database can handle it.

You don't store the original text. You store the hash of it. If you SHA512 it, anything that's ever given in the password field will always be 64Bytes.

The only "legit" reason to restrict input to 16 character is if you're using an encryption mechanism that just doesn't support more characters as an input. However, if that's the case, that's a site I wouldn't want to use to begin with if at all possible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (6 children)

The resulting hash will always be the same size, but you don't want to have an unlimited upper bound otherwise I'm using a 25GB blueray rip as my password and your service is going to have to calculate the hash of that whenever I login.

Sensible upper bounds are a must to provide a reliable service not open to DDOS exploits.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I'll admit I kind of typed this without thinking it through. In a secured site, the password would be hashed and salted before storing in the database.

Depending on where you're doing the hashing, long strings might still slow you down. That being said, from a security standpoint, any gain in entropy by adding characters would be negligible past a certain point. I don't remember what that number is but it certainly isn't in the thousands.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Even 255 bytes with 10 million entries is only ~2.6GB of data you need to store, and if you have 10 million users the probably $1 a month extra that would cost is perfectly fine.

I suppose there may be a performance impact too since you have to read more data to check the hash, but servers are so fast now it doesn't seem like that would be significant unless your backend was poorly made.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but what if I have one user with 9.9 million accounts? That bastard

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Oh and also, "change this every four weeks please."

Okay then. NEW PASSWORD: pa$$word_Aug24

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Invalid password, maximum 13 characters.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Only a maximum of 3 digits allowed

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yep. Having to have requirements that doesn't flow with people very well and requiring constant updates, people WILL find shortcuts. In the office, I've seen sheets of paper with the password written down, I've seen sticky notes, I've seen people put them in notepad/word so they could just copy paste.

This is made worse, because you have to go out of your way for a password manager, which means you need to know what that is. And you need a good one because there has been (and I'm going to generalize here) problems with some password managers in the past. And for work, they have to allow a password manager for that to even be an option. Which you then end up with this security theater.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

And you need a good one because there has been problems with some password managers in the past.

coughLastPasscough

“Problems”. What an delightfully understated term to use.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

the password cannot contains the same sequences of characters as the old password.

and i have seen this requirement in a service that requires changing it every month for some reasons.

and this is to manage a government digital identity that allows to log it in all governments websites.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Reasonable upper limits are OK. But FFS, the limit should be enough to have a passphrase with 4 or 5 words in it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Usually 256 bit hash is used. 256 bits is 32 bytes or 32 characters. Of course you are losing some entropy because character set is limited, but 32 characters is beyond reasonable anyway.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The eff passphrase generator has about 2.5 bits of entropy per character (without word separators). Eff recommends 6 word passphrases, and with an avg word length of 7, that's (only) 79.45 bits of entropy that won't even fit in the 32 characters. If there wasn't a password length limit it would be possible to saturate the hash entropy with a 20+ word & 102+ char passphrase.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I'd be totally fine woth 32 characters! But I've come across too many websites with unreasonably short (20 characters or less) limits.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Just opened a PayPal account and their limit is 20. Plus the only 2fa option is sms 🙃.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I just double checked and I have TOTP enabled for my PayPal account so it should be an option.

I just found this support article of theirs and it says it can only be enabled through their website and not through the app (why?!) so you might be running into that?

https://www.paypal.com/uk/cshelp/article/what-is-2-step-verification-and-how-do-i-turn-it-on-or-off-help167

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Probably people would struggle to scan the QR Code with their smartphone. I think most apps can scan it from a image but obviously this would be unsafe, especially when people sync their screenshot to the cloud.

I can 100% confirm totp exist for PayPal, because I'm using it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

That last part definitely isn't true.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

"Your password needs to be less than 65k characters long" >:(

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Darn, can't use the entire Bee Movie on Blu-Ray as my password then.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Basically guaranteed to be a clear text offender

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