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NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

179 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Here is the text of the NIST sp800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines.

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[–] [email protected] 336 points 1 month ago (76 children)

Reworded rules for clarity:

Min required length must be 8 chars (obligatory), but it should be 15 chars (recommended).

Max length should allow at least 64 chars.

You should accept all ASCII plus space.

You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.

Don't demand composition rules (e.g. "u're password requires a comma! lol lmao haha" tier idiocy)

Don't bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there's evidence of compromise.

Don't store password hints that others can guess.

Don't prompt the user to use knowledge-based authentication.

Don't truncate passwords for verification.

I was expecting idiotic rules screaming "bureaucratic muppets don't know what they're legislating on", but instead what I'm seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Don't truncate passwords for verification.

It needed to be said. Because some password system architects have been just that stupid.

Edit: Fear of other's stupidity is the mind killer. I will face my fear. My fear will wash over me, and when it has passed, only I will remain. Or I'll be dead in a car accident caused by an AI driver.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I've seen sites truncate when setting, but not on checking. So you set a password on a site with no stated limit, go to use said password, and get locked out. It's infuriating

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn't, so the password didn't work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

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

Sounds like my bank.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Banks usually have the absolute worst password policies. It's typically because their backend is some crusty mainframe from the 80s that limits inputs to something absurdly insecure by today's standards and they've kicked the upgrade can down the road for so long now that it's a staggeringly monumental task to rewrite it all. Thankfully most of them have upgraded at this point, but every now and then you still find one that's got ridiculous limits like a maximum password length of 8 and only alphanumeric characters (with no 2FA obviously).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Another ridiculous policy I've seen (many years ago) is logging in too fast. I used to get locked out of my banks website all the time and I used autotype with KeePass so I was baffled when it wouldn't get accepted. Eventually I had a thought to slow down the typing mechanism and suddenly I didn't get locked out anymore.

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