86
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by FinancesDrone98@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

Why do so many companies and people say that your password has to be so long and complicated, just to have restrictions?

I am in the process of changing some passwords (I have peen pwnd and it’s the password I use for use-less-er sites) and suddenly they say “password may contain a maximum of 15 characters“… I mean, 15 is long but it’s nothing for a password manager.

And then there’s the problem with special characters like äàáâæãåā ñ ī o ė ß ÿ ç just to name a few, or some even won’t let you type a [space] in them. Why is that? Is it bad programming? Or just a symptom of copy-pasta?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 year ago

Yes its bad programing. These restrictions suggest that the company is either doing improper storage and processing, or does not understand how to deal with passwords.

The proper password storage is a hash. This is a cryptographic function that is easy to do and imbossible to undo. The hash function operates on the underlying binary representation of your password, and doesn't card what letters or symbols are in it. A program should take your password, hash it, and compare the result to the hash they have in their detebase.

The current recomended hash algorythm is called 'bcrypt'. Depending on the implementation, the input is between 50 and 70 bytes (the spec was a little unclear so people defined the inputs diferently, but the algorithe is the same). This means a password should be able to take at least 50 normal keyboard characters, including letters, symbols, and spaces. Anything less than that indicates a poor practice on behalf of the website.

(a lot of this is simplified. There is some variation and nuance that I don't think affects the main idea)

[-] AzzyDev@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

What about Argon2id? What are the advantages of bcrypt?

[-] dog@suppo.fi 1 points 1 year ago

Argon2 is the best (secure) crypto currently.

That said, adoption is slow, Bitwarden only recently implemented it for example.

That said, due to Argon2 being security-oriented, the recommended settings for it are pretty heavy.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
86 points (96.7% liked)

Programming

17299 readers
105 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS