Submitted 3 weeks ago by Kissaki@feddit.org to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/57728a86-1f01-4908-94fc-2bf0dc500417.png
In password security, the longer the better. With a password manager, using more than 24 characters is simple. Unless, of course, the secure password is not accepted due to its length. (In this case, through STOVE.)
Possibly indicating cleartext storage of a limited field (which is an absolute no-go), or suboptimal or lacking security practices.
Okay so I agree with you that a longer password is better but this in no way indicates clear text password storage.
Is the maximum 24 characters because their database column is a VARCHAR(24)? That’s one of the first questions that I thought of. Sure, it doesn’t guarantee plaintext, but it’s a indicator that it may be stored plaintext, considering hashing doesn’t care about length. Or at the very least whoever has had eyes on this code doesn’t know shit about security, which makes me less confident in the product as a whole.
The only reason I can think of to have a maximum would be to save on bandwidth and CPU cycles, and even then 24 characters is ridiculously stingy when the difference would be negligible.
bcrypt hashes only the first 72 bytes. 24 characters is the max amount of 4 byte UTF8 characters when using bcrypt. Which is stupid because UTF8 is variable, but still, it’s a possible explanation.
Cryptographic hash functions actually have fixed runtime too, to avoid timing-based attacks.
So correct password implementations use the same storage and cpu-time regardless of the password.
I would have thought the opposite. I remember having a familiar conversation: “we need a sanity check in the password: what would no sane person do?” I believe we cut it off at 64 characters, but I can see someone thinking 24 is kore than enough, if they’ve never used a password generator.
Password hashes always have the same length.
Why is there a limit at 24? It may be an arbitrary limit set, or it may be because they don’t store more.
What would be the other reason for a password length limit so low ? I could understand limiting to like 64 characters but 24 sounds low.
I heard some banks encrypt single characters of the password separately (no idea how that would be safe) they often ask to provide random characters from the password instead of the entire password.
My bank only accepts up to 20 characters. It doesn’t validate it… The login page simply ignores all characters beyond 20th. So I didn’t even know that it cut my password until I tried to log into the mobile app, which replaces the last character when you type more than 20… that was confusing 20 minutes when I didn’t know why I can’t log into my mobile app.
At least they tell you. I’ve had inputs take the full password and then truncate it silently, so you don’t actually know what they saved. Then, you try to login and they tell you wrong password.
I once encountered a system that truncated your submitted password if you logged in through their app, but not through their website. So you would set your password through the website, verify that the login was working (through the website) and then have that same login fail through the app.
Yes I’ve had issues with this as well, since I’m a child I’ve set my password generator length at 69 characters… A small trick I’ve found is to delete and rewrite the last character of one of the two repeated passwords since often the validity check gets triggered on write but not on paste
This shit pisses me off so bad. I had an identity theft a few years back, took ages to undo, and my credit score is still impacted by it. At the time I moved to a password manager and all my passwords are 31 characters of garbage. I’ve got several, highly sensitive accounts that my passwords don’t work for, in fact one a bank, until fairly recently, had repurposed a phone number field in the DB so passwords were limited to 10 characters numeric only (I managed to get one of their IT folks on the horn to explain why the password was so awful).
I cannot believe we live in 2025 and we still haven’t figured out passwords.
My bank forces a 6 digit PIN as a password.
Their 2fa is also email or text only.
At least we can set a unique username?
Yeah, I’m up to 40 hide my addresses for that same reason. Figure if the password sucks, at least the email can be unique and obscure.
Meh, if they lock you out after X attempts, then 6 digits is fine. Hell, even 4 digits is fine if they have a lockout-policy.
Do they have a limit on attempts?
We have figured out passwords. Management hasn’t figured out allocating resources to security, and governments haven’t figured out fining the crap out of such companies.
all our banks and government systems and may online services work on a governments own 2fa, and there are several variants. They are linked to phone and require inputting Pins. Very comfortable, very secure and very convenient. Also very fast.
Don’t get me wrong, there are systems that work. I built up a very successful smart card based system many years ago after a failed audit. I initially hated the idea but in the end we built a crazy secure environment that was very easy to use and maintain. That project is long since obsolete but after doing that one, over a decade ago, I figured things were headed in the right direction.
I think I’m extra sensitive right now because my aging mom has made the issue acute. She’s not the same as she was a few years ago and helping her with all her online accounts has become a nightmare. It’s just too complicated for many folks.
My worst experience so far was a webpage that trimmed passwords to 20 characters in length without telling you. Good luck logging in afterwards…
One of my favorite memories of how much Something Awful’s sysadmins were absolutely amateur hour back in the early 2000s was the “lappy” to “laptop” debacle. Apparently Lowtax found the term “lappy” so annoying that he ordered his system administrator to do a find/replace for every instance of “lappy,” replacing them with “laptop.”
Unfortunately this included usernames and passwords, as well as anything that just managed to have the letters “lappy” in that order anywhere in the word. So, there was one user named ‘Clappy’ who woke up one day to find his name changed to ‘Claptop.’ Apparently this is also how people discovered that they were storing password unsalted in plain text in a fucking MySQL database, which if you’re old enough, you probably already remember that the combination of MySQL and PHPmyAdmin were like Swiss cheese when it comes to site defense. :p
That must have done a lot of dawizard to their reputation.
Flaptop Bird
As long as their login page also does that :p
Common mistake for amateurs that found a password library and used it without reading the documentation. E. g. bcrypt will tell you to salt and hash the password before digesting it into constant length output for your database.
Salting before doing anything else is basic password security. I assume the webpage in question doesn’t do that, either.
I remember some office software that didn’t accept certain special characters but didn’t tell the user and just accepted the new password. I had to bother IT support many times to reset my password.
We have a customer, a big international corporation, that has very specific rules for their intranet passwords:
I can only assume that whoever came up with these rules is either an especially demented BofH, or they have some really really weird legacy infrastructure to deal with.
I am a designer, but I once did a project with a very very major and recognizable tech corporation that, no joke, implemented an 8 character limit on passwords for storage reasons.
This company made in the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year, and they were penny-pinching on literal bytes of data.
I can’t say who it is, but their name begins with ‘M’ and ends in ‘cAfee.’
If password length affects storage size then something has gone very wrong. They should be hashed, not encrypted or in plaintext.
I can’t say who it is, but their name begins with ‘M’ and ends in ‘cAfee.’
Whoever the company is, we have to assume it’s not a security company. Because, surely, none of those would do that ever.
No repeats??? Like, you cant have ‘aaaa123@’ as a password?
You’re just making it easier to brute force…
Since the password has to be changed every two months, I would assume that it means no repeating previously used passwords.
I worked in IT for a big national company for a short time. Passwords rules were : at least 8 characters, at least one uppercase letter, at least one number, change password every 2/3 months and different than the 3 previous ones. Several workers had a post-it on the screen with the 4 passwords they use. One of them had name of child and year of birth, I don’t know if it was his children or his relatives’ children too.
Your password MUST contain big and small letters, and contain at least 1 number character and 1 spacial character, it MUST be 8 characters long, and it MUST be typed on a German Cherry keyboard between 8-9 PM, using ONLY 1 finger while blindfolded and listening to ABBA music.
This is because of something called entropy we never even read about so we have zero understanding of it.
Making all these possibilities OPTIONAL would actually make for safer passwords (higher entropy), as would using multiple words separated by spaces. Then only meaningful way to accept a password would be to test it against common bad passwords, and test the entropy to determine acceptable levels. There is no good reason a password couldn’t be 10 words and at least 127 characters. There is no way that should stress a properly designed modern system.
You have described all of the guidelines that NIST, Microsoft, GCHQ and a few other institutions now recommend for password security.
And yet I still have to have this argument with so-called security engineers and my favourite, compliance officers.
the guidelines that NIST, Microsoft, GCHQ and a few other institutions now recommend for password security
Because they are morons that don’t understand entropy.
Requiring at least 1 number increases entropy less than simply allowing the use of numbers, and then recommending it.
But most password queries are lousy at describing what’s allowed when creating it, and they generally don’t describe it at all when you enter it for access.
The second part can be crucial for remembering exactly how the password was created, because what is now required, used to often not even be possible to use!
you forgot that you can only use a selection of special characters from a pre approved list of 10.
Had that yesterday.
“Must use special characters!”
“Okay, no problem. Here you go.”
“Not that one! It’s too special!”
“Dude, I haven’t even touched extended ASCII yet.”
A pre-approved list of 10 which THEY DON’T EVEN TELL YOU WHAT THEY ARE
I love when there are so many rules that my first few randomly-generated passwords are rejected.
Even worse, when you can’t figure out why, or how to configure the generator, then end up having to type your own anyway
genuinely, whats up with not being able to use spaces?
I think it’s originally because of bad programming. It’s so incredibly stupid I don’t have words.
I like the ones that just tell you your password strength.
Subtle shaming of bad passwords without giving bad actors hints as to what the minimum (and thus most likely) password is.
My mum told be the other day she logged onto a new bank, gave it a 12 character password then couldn’t get back in after. When she got through to their customer services they said that it was an 8 character password limit (!), but it just never said on the register screen.
Yeah, I’d be doing that bank if there’s any choice.
Either this is some new slang I’m not rizz enough to understand or one of us had a stroke.
Microsoft does this to our users at my job. They go to charge their password and it won’t accept it but won’t tell them what the requirements are. “Your password doesn’t meet our criteria.” Okay, so what are you looking for???
Worst is that there seems to be a soft block at some point and instead of telling them that, it shows this dumb error instead over and over again no matter what password they choose.
Maybe that’s security by obscurity. Or security by confusion. /s
so secure, no one can get in, even her!
Ah must be my bank. Same.
How about creating a new account, letting bitwarden create a password, only for them to send me a clear text copy of that passwod in their confirmation email…
Here’s your password, remember to write it down on your password post-it!
i thought that practice died like 20 years ago
I’ve had a case in the past where I reduced my password to the limit, but after account creation, I was not able to log in.
Turns out they had an off-by-one issue, and a password with a length slightly below the limit worked fine.
My favorite is when they don’t have this check, but silently slice the string to meet the requirement, so that you can’t login with the original password the next time.
Don’t worry, pretty soon they will just block password managers from autofilling fields on their login page so that you HAVE to remember your password! Then you’ll be happy it can’t be that long, you can only fit so much on a post-it note on the side of your monitor
/s
For a system I worked on a few years ago I got the password requirement:
Only upper case letters A-Z, no letter or symbols.
Exactly 7 characters.
I was also recommended to make it a single word to make it memorable.
funniest experience that ive had is that i made a psn (playstation network) account with a 64 (iirc) character password. That worked making the account on my PC on their website. Never was able to log into that account on my playstation tho and the error message was just some generic error. Support didnt know what was going on and i didnt either until it dawned me. The password was too long for the console. Changed the whole thing to a shorter one and now it works everywhere. Used to work on their website, not in the app, not on console. Fun.
i once used 20 for a bank. the website havent told me it was too long just clipped off 2 and accepted the rest. not even the banking support was able to help me. took me a few days to solve this by accident.
The password should be hashed anyway, which has a fixed output
If I have to create a password Ill need to remember and don’t have access to my password manager for whatever reason I have a long phrase that’s my go to but I have a system about adding numbers and characters to it based on the context of the log in. Sites with character limits really fuck that up.
Recently had a password that was acceptable for the account creation page on the website but too long for the login screen in the mobile app.
Took me a while to figure out that pasting into that field was just quietly dropping characters.
One time I worked a job where you had to make EXACTLY a 12 character password using only ten letters and two numbers.
One of the accounts that I have to use at my job is like this but much much worse. It only accepts letters and numbers, no capitalization, no symbols and can only be 8 digits long maximum. It’s like they want to account to be easy to compromise.
There should be a limit to prevent DoS attacks but really it should be like 1M characters or something.
c/passwordtoostrong
The password on my PC is something like 30 characters long. Back when win10 was first coming out, they were pushing getting an actual outlook account and tying that to your login. I was hesitant at first, but figured I’d try it out and see how that worked for me.
Turns out outlook accounts (at the time) had something like a 16 character limit on passwords. Bruh.
Obligatory neal.fun/password-game/
Happens more and more often
Then again, there’s not much point to super long passwords. They’ll be turned into hashes, commonly of 128, 196, or 256 bits length. When brute forcing, by a certain length, it’s pretty much guaranteed there’s a shorter combination computing to the same hash. And an attacker doesn’t need your password, just some password that computes to the same hash. With 256 bit hashes a password with 1000 characters isn’t more secure than one with 15 in any meaningful way.
When I banked with wells fucking fargo they had issues similar to this. I had something like a 16 character password and I once forgot the last character and it accepted it anyway, so there was some kind of character limit that they didn’t make obvious.
I also had a time I accidentally had caps lock on, and my password still was accepted. Their passwords were not case sensitive even though their password screen says they were.
This seems to be very common still
tarsisurdi@lemmy.eco.br 3 weeks ago
I once registered an account with a random ~25 characters long password (Keepass PM) for buying tickets on uhuu.com.br
The website allowed me to create the account just fine, but once I verified my e-mail, I couldn’t log into it due to there being a character limit ONLY IN THE LOGIN PASSWORD FIELD. Atrocious.
skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 3 weeks ago
PayPal did the same. Registration took 40 characters, login only half of that. Editing the login form didn’t work unfortunately.
Etterra@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
It’s pretty stupid because the longer the password the more secure it is.
scintilla@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I understand a cap of like 64 characters or something to keep storage space down for a company with millions of users. other than that it doesn’t make a ton of sense.
FiniteLooper@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I’ve had this exact same thing happen.
I’ve also had it happen where you have the two fields to verify the password is the same. One had a maxlength set in it, and the other didn’t. I was for sure entering the same password and I was so confused until I opened up the dev tools and inspected the inputs.
AA5B@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’ve seen this behavior too, I forget where. For me it was a bit easier since the fields displayed a different number of stars. I did spend too long trying to figure out how my password manager could be failing that way