All this 2FA, SSH, token / key stuff is garbage. Rectal vascular mapping is the only legitimate security option.
Now this is security I can get behind! Err, in front of?
It took me a moment to notice those weren’t specifically security terms…
“Please insert your webcam.”
I have one in my house! 🏡 Just reverse into it and Viola! The door opens! Works for the ref too! Hands free baby!
How about making it illegal to block copying and pasting on website forms. I’m literally more likely to make a mistake by typing a routing number than copying and pasting it. The penalty for should be death by firing into the sun to anyone caught implementing any such stupidity.
Frankly I’m mostly annoyed that my browser allows web sites to block cut and paste, ever. I am capable of making my own decisions over whether I want to cut and paste.
There are plugins that will disallow this. I think the one I use is “don’t fuck with paste”
Browsers shouldn’t allow half of the stuff that they allow. You have to do the same thing not just with copy and paste, but also searching on the page with
ctrl + f. Like I don’t care that websites won’t to create their own experience. Don’t mess with browser behavior.You really want to memorise different shortcuts for search? What if you’re on a web app like discord? Ctrl+f isn’t gonna be as useful as a built in search solution that has access to data that isn’t visible until searched for. I get the issues on disabling the features but if they’re replacing browser behaviour with something that suits the site better I think that’s alright as long as it’s not s downgrade.
All too often it is a downgrade though. A lot of those webapps have terrible search and I only want to search for what is on the current page anyways. For example reddit search has been notoriously bad for a long time. Half the forums online seem to be using the exact same open source software with the exact same terrible search. When all too often I just want to find what is on the current page anyways.
Ooh, ooh. And for implementing any Javascript or jQuery or whatever that pops up some kind of smarmy message when you right click: Believe it or not, straight to jail.
Plus, that kind of thing is not going to prevent anyone from scraping images from anywhere if they have the capability to lift a finger to press F12.
Some do detect open developer tools and nuke the whole page, though.
Exactly.
My host decided to update their TOS to force me to accept binding arbitration, so I Inspect Elemented that right off the page and sent a message to support to end my service effective immediately (had been a paying customer for years). You’re not going to bully me on my own browser…
It won’t block it yes but it will diminish the amount of people doing it which is the point
Never thought to look for an extension for that. Thanks for mentioning it.
You can also just run it when you need it rather than having to add an extension. Just add a bookmarklet with the code here and just click it when you encounter a problematic website.
It’ll reduce your attack surface while still getting the job done.
https://github.com/jswanner/DontF-WithPaste?tab=readme-ov-file#bookmarklet
Even better, thanks!
It takes way less Delta V to push them into solar escape velocity.
Anger is no excuse to be inefficient with propellant after all
Idk, it might delay the sun imploding a smidge. Or maybe it would accelerate it. Eh, they know what they’re doing…
I circumvent that by right-clicking, then choosing “Inspect element”, then switching to the tab “Console”, then typing $0.value = “TheValueIWantToPaste”. If right-clicking is also disabled, I use either F12 or Tools menu > DevTools.
that’s so easy! /s
easier than typing out a long string
And here I wrote an AutoHotKey script to type out my clipboard a character at a time so I can paste stuff into this remote desktop software I’m using that doesn’t support paste…
It’s kinda necessary when the server’s unlock password is 256 characters long and completely random.
if it’s citrix you used to be able to modify the local connection config file to allow access to the clipboard regardless of what the server allowed.
been a few years since I needed to do it, but it was possible at one time.
That sounds fun on mobile
Or just delete the “readonly” bit. I did that on Treasury Direct for years until they finally removed that nonsense.
Sometimes it’s not “readonly”, but a Javascript thing that “event.preventDefault()” and “return false” during the “onpaste” event. As the event is generally set using elm.addEventListener instead of setting elm.onpaste, it’s not possible to remove the listener, as it’d need the reference for the handler function that was set to handle the mentioned JS event. So simply setting the value directly using elm.value bypasses the onpaste event.
That’s fair, not sure why they’d go through that much effort when DOM attributes exist.
Think of the environment!
Less Delta-V to eject them from the solar system.
Don’t forget you save lots of fuel by firing out of the solar system instead
Meanwhile, my company has systems insisting on expiring ssh keys after 90 days…
Fools! You have to expire the whole system!
Reinstall everything every 90 days. It’s the only way.
You are going to give them ideas…
Ironically, reinstall the whole system, make sure to add some CrowdStrike, SolarWinds, and Ivanti for security and management though…
I’m surprised they’d expire the SSH keys rather than just requiring the password for the key to be rotated. I guess it’s not too bad if the key itself is automatically rotated.
It would be more secure to have SSH keys that are stored on Yubikeys, though. Get the Yubikeys that check fingerprints (Yubikey Bio) if you’re extra paranoid.
Problem they had was that ssh doesn’t really have any way to enforce details of how the client key manifests and behaves. They could ship out the authentication devices after the security team trusted the public key, but that was more than they would have been willing to deal with.
Rotating the passphrase in the key wouldn’t do any good anyway. If an attacker got a hold of your encrypted key to start guessing the passphrase, that instance of the key will never know that another copy has a passphrase change.
My company blocked ssh keys in favour of password + 2FA. Honestly I don’t mind the 2FA since we use yubikeys, but wouldn’t ssh key + 2FA be better?
All well and good when ssh activity is anchored in a human doing interactive stuff, but not as helpful when there’s a lot of headless automation that has to get from point a to point b.
Yep. All the headless automation broke…
Just store your keys on the yubikey. Problem solved.
Or use a smart card profile and go that route.
We use keys + Yubikey 2FA (the long alphanumeric strings when you touch the Yubikey) at work, alhough they want to move all 2FA to Yubikey FIDO2/WebAuthn in the future since regular numeric/text 2FA codes are vulnerable to phishing. All our internal webapps already require FIDO2, as does our email (Microsoft 365).
One thing they should change is the word “password.” This implies that it’s a short string. Changing it to “passphrase” will help people feel comfortable choosing credentials like “correct horse battery staple.”
I recently set up a password with a 16 character max, alphanumeric only, no spaces. The service is in no way a security threat but still.
A couple years ago I ran into one with a 12 character limit…
I never understood password limits, other than something sufficiently large like 256 to prevent DOS. It’s not like the password is actually being stored anywhere… right? RIGHT??
Interesting that unicode support is suggested. Emoji passwords could be fun.
Characters are characters. The system I just wrote will accept anything, because the first thing I do with it is hash it. If you want to make your password:
░▒▓█ ʥ۞ݔݯݲݸݴݺ '; drop table
users; 🤣💩ʩ █▓▒░Then go for it. More power to you for typing that out or, more likely, letting your password manager remember it. Make your password as entropic as you can manage, I don’t care how you arrive there.
Yup. All I care is that your password isn’t the entire works of Shakespeare or something like that. A couple hundred characters/bytes? You do you.
What really bothers me is when a website says something like: must have a special character, except these ones (proceeds to list everything except @ and !). And then the next one has the same rule, but different exceptions.
Passwords should be treated as a black box, just read it as bytes and throw it into the hash algorithm. You want to somehow enter a nyan cat? Be my guest, no guarantee the input box will accept it though.
also: “password is too long, max password length is 12 digits”
Why… like, sure, cap it at 256 or something reasonable. but ive run into as low as 9 digits.
One of the four major banks in Australia used to (or maybe still does?) limit passwords to 6 characters. No more, no less. Exactly 6. They’re case insensitive, too.
One of the other banks used to silently truncate passwords (to 12 characters if I remember correctly). They removed the truncation one day, and there were so many issues because people who had passwords longer than 12 characters couldn’t log in unless they knew to only enter the first 12 characters of it. It was a mess. Their phone support had a recorded message saying to only enter the first 12 characters if you have trouble logging in.
I had a simulator for school truncate after like 13 characters. And nowhere on their page did it specify a character limit. Would still accept an input of like 64 characters though. Got locked out of that account many times.
I’ve run into similar: on the account creation page there was no character limit on the input box nor stated in the password requirements, but on the login page the password input box was limited to 14 characters. So you could successfully create an account with a long password, you just couldn’t log in because it wouldn’t let you enter the whole password.
Haha, and I smiled when I looking for the single quote in your password and sure it is there👍👍
my password is just 20 gigabytes of poop emojis.
Emoji passwords made me think of the Lotus Notes password prompt with their little images that changed as I typed (which never really made sense to me).
Yes, I’m old…
Multiple languages.
Yeah, multiple languages or even putting an ê or something in an English password to mix things up. It makes perfect sense to allow.
It’s a good thing they require each codepoint to be treated as one character for the length limit, since “🤔🤣” is 8 bytes on its own, but the unicode prefix is trivial to guess.
Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
About damn time. I log into my company laptop with a smart card and PIN or a PIN/authenticator code, computer autoconnects to the VPN, and I’m good to go. If there’s no internet available, the smart card will still get me into my computer. If I’m on my personal computer, I log in with the PIN/authenticator. This morning I tried really hard to find someplace where I had the option of entering a password and there is none, yet I have to change my password every 6 months. At least my IT department lets me use KeePass.
I’ll log into my home desktop and I’ll get a message telling me that “it’s time to reset your password!”
First of all, how dare you, on my computer? In my home?
Secondly, I don’t even have a password on this thing
Eh, I think they should nag users to change their password proportional to how “strong” their password is. If you’re barely meeting the minimum: reset every few months. If you’re using a proper passphrase dozens of characters long: only reset if there’s evidence of compromise.
The app my work uses to show 401k, pay, request leave, etc details, uses a ridiculous webapp that’s very slow, and on top of this, they nag you literally every 4 months to update your password. I used to be a good boy and memorize a new password each time. Now I just add a new letter into BitWarden and it’s my new password. Apparently this is more secure??
I just add 1 to the number at the end of my password every time they force a change.
I’m on 18 right now.
My favorite are some of the work systems that I need to access, but only infrequently, yet still have ridiculous password expiration rules. Nearly every time I log in, before I can access the system I have to change my password because of course it’s expired again. So I change the password, write it down because I’ll never remember it months from now when I need to use that password exactly once to login and change my password yet again.
the document is nearly impossible to read all the way through and just as hard to understand fully
It is a boring document but it not impossible to read through, nor understand. The is what compliances officer do. I have a (useless) cybersecurity degree and reading NIST publications is part of my lecture.
My career as a sysadmin consistently has me veering toward security and compliance and my brain is absolutely fried on trying to figure out what these huge docs actually mean, how they apply to the things I’m responsible for and what we’re supposed to do about it.
Props to all the folks that can do it without losing their mind.
You need to first understand the grand structure of the doc, then cherry pick the content to action points. At least that’s how I do it.
You break it down into chunks and delegate. They’re not expecting any one person to implement the whole thing.
Useless??? Ever since the pandemic and the need for a robust remote work infrastructure, the amount of cybersecurity related job offers has exploded. And they’re very well paid where I live.
The knowledge and skill are useful, but I can’t say the same for the degree
It sets both the technical requirements and recommended best practices for determining the validity of methods used to authenticate digital identities online. Organizations that interact with the federal government online are required to be in compliance
My argument is that if this document (and others) are requirements for companies shouldn’t there also be a more approachable document for people to use?
Sure, have the jargon filled document that those in the know can access, but without an additional not so jargon-y document you’ve just added a barrier to change. Maybe just an abstract of the rule changes on the front page without the jargon?
I don’t know, maybe it’s not a big deal to compliance officers but just seems to me (someone that isn’t a compliance officer) that obfuscating the required changes behind jargon and acronyms is going to slow adoption of the changes.
It needs to be specific to be clear for its purposes. You can express everything in simpler terms but then you risk leaving things out of definitions. It’s basically legal speak.
Normally, you’d read the scope of such a document to see whether it fits your purpose, then cherry-pick the chapters necessary. If something’s unclear, you can google pretty much everything.
Doing that a few times will make it infinitely easier! You especially get to understand those broad, inaccessible definitions a lot easier.
You heard it: stop imposing composition rules!
i had to login for some functions at work. i believe the minimums were 8 characters, 1 caapitol, 1 number. and we all hated it, because the passwords had to be changed every 90 days, and you couldn’t reuse passwords. eventually you are going to run out of things you can reasonably use that you could remember and then would be forced to use some sort of password manager. but OOPSIE you couldn’t install any software on the office computer so you would have to resort to writing them down somewhere. it was a mess.
fortunately corporate decided to just change the entire system adopting most of these rules, min 15 characters, no special character, no hints, no forced changing passwords unless you think you have been compromised or just want to change it. we do have to use 2fa to access some things if you aren’t sitting at the office computer but other than that people are much happier about passwords now.
Half the users passwords is going to be {Company}@{YEAR}
Don’t forget classics like Fuck_this_shit1! Fuck_this_shit2!
Oh umm. I would never make my password this…
For places that require periodic password changes I always append 2024Q3 or similar on the end of the same password. I KNOW that’s not secure, but f that place for being dumb
I would always just create 1 password and append a number and it’s special char, cycling from 1 to 0; like
1!,2@,3#. Never stayed at a place long enough to go higher than 7 or 8.I never gave a fuck about doing this because it’s the companies fault for applying stupid policies. Whenever I’ve been allowed a password manager, they got real security instead of malicious compliance.
I feel like it’s not a big impact on security if I use 2fa anyway. (Base password)(month)(year) is fine for me 😅
Stockholm1 (capitol)
90 days later:
Stockholm2
Ah, the downstream effects of compliance teams.
“Hurry we gotta check off all the boxes!!! What do these measures actually address? Don’t know, don’t care! Comply!”
Any password length (within reason) and any character should be allowed. It’s going to be hashed and only the hash will be stored right? Length and character limits make me suspect it’s being stored in plain text.
I don’t know about a min length; setting a lenient lower bound means that any passwords in that space are going to be absolutely brute force-able (and because humans are lazy, there are almost certainly be passwords clustered around the minimum).
I very much agree with the rest though, it’s unnerving when sites have a low max length. It almost feels like advertising that passwords aren’t being hashed, and if that’s the case there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that they’re also salted. Really restrictive character sets also tell me that said site / company either has super old infra or doesn’t know how to sanitize strings (or entirely likely both)…
The only justifiable reason I can see to have a length limit is because longer passwords would take more time to process and they don’t want to deal with that.
Although it would only be on the order of a couple of extra microseconds and I’m not sure how much difference it would really make. But even on cyber security forums the max password length is 64 characters.
But it really doesn’t, unless you’re sending megabytes of text or something. Industry standard password algorithms run the hash a lot of times, and your entry will only impact the first iteration.
I usually set mine to 256 characters to prevent DOS attacks, and also so I don’t need to update it ever. Most of my passwords are actually around 20-30 characters in length (I pick a random length in the slider on my password manager), because I don’t want to be there all day if I ever need to manually enter it (looking at you stupid smart TV…).
unless you’re sending megabytes of text or something
That’s exactly what someone malicious would do though, either in a single password submission or DOS via the password maximum repeatedly. IMO there is no functional security difference between a 64 and a 256 character password, so the NIST 64 character max is reasonable.
You should probably have some safeguard to prevent jokers from uploading 14.2 gigabytes of absolute nonsense into your system’s password field just to see if they can make it crash. But I think limiting it to, like, 8 kB ought to be quite lenient for anything with a modern internet connection.
As others have noticed, various hashing functions have an upperbound input length limit anyway. But I don’t see any pressing reason to limit your field length to exactly that, even if only not to reveal anything about what you might be feeding that value into behind the scenes.
I usually do 256 characters. That’s long enough that most password managers top out anyway (mine tops out at 128), and it shouldn’t ever present a DOS risk. Anything much beyond that and you’ll go beyond the hash length.
Rules here are 64 as a reasonable maximum. A lot of programmers don’t realize that bcrypt and scrypt max at 72 bytes (which may or may not be the same as 72 characters). You can get around it by prehashing, but meh. This is long enough even for a reasonable passphrase scheme.
Minor note: 64 unicode characters is potentially much more than 72 bytes.
Then you’re vulnerable to simple brute force attacks, which if paired with a dumped hash table, can severely cut the time it takes to solve the hash and reveal all passwords.
By any length I meant no maximum length. Obviously you don’t want to use a super short password.
Some kind of upper bound is usually sensible. You can open a potential DoS vector by accepting anything. The 72 byte bcrypt/scrypt limit is generally sensible, but going for 255 would be fine. There’s very little security to be gained at those lengths.
I do 256 so I hopefully never need to update it, but most of my passwords are 20-30 characters or something, and generated by my password manager. I don’t care if you choose to write a poem or enter a ton of unicode, I just need a bunch of bytes to hash.
“What’s your password?”
“The letter A.”
Mine is the null string. They’ll never guess it!
At roughly 35,000 words and filled with jargon and bureaucratic terms, the document is nearly impossible to read all the way through and just as hard to understand fully.
A section devoted to passwords injects a large helping of badly needed common sense practices that challenge common policies. An example: The new rules bar the requirement that end users periodically change their passwords. This requirement came into being decades ago when password security was poorly understood, and it was common for people to choose common names, dictionary words, and other secrets that were easily guessed.
Since then, most services require the use of stronger passwords made up of randomly generated characters or phrases. When passwords are chosen properly, the requirement to periodically change them, typically every one to three months, can actually diminish security because the added burden incentivizes weaker passwords that are easier for people to set and remember.
A.k.a use a password manager for most things and a couple of long complex passwords for things that a password manager wouldn’t work for (the password manager’s password, encrypted system partitions, etc). I’m assuming In just summed up 35,000 words.
Cracking an 8-char on an ordinary desktop or laptop PC can still take quite a while depending on the details. Unfortunately, the existence of specialized crypto-coin-mining rigs designed to spit out hashes at high speed, plus the ability to farm things out into the cloud, means that the threat we’re facing is no longer the lone hacker cracking things on his own PC.
Newer password hashing algorithms have ways of combatting this. For example, argon2 will use a large amount of memory and CPU and can be tuned for execution time. So theoretically you could configure it to take 0.5 seconds per hash calculation and use 1 GB or more of ram. That’s going to be extremely difficult to bruteforce 8 characters.
The trade-off is it will take a second or two to login each time, but if you’ve got some secondary pin system in place for frequent reauthentication, it can be a pretty good setup.
Another disadvantage is the algorithm effectively gets less secure the less powerful your local device is. Calculating that same 0.5s hash on a beefy server vs your phone could make it take way longer or even impossible without enough ram.
Unfortunately, it’s rare that we can control what hashing algorithm is being used to secure the passwords we enter. I merely pray that any account that also holds my credit card data or other important information isn’t using MD5. Some companies still don’t take cybersecurity seriously.
Storing credit card data has its own set of strict security rules that need to be followed. It’s also the credit card company’s problem, not yours, as long as you dispute any fraudulent charges early enough.
I’m coming at this from the perspective of a developer. A user can always use a longer password (and you should), but it’s technically possible to make an 8 character password secure, thus the NIST recommend minimum.
