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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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The most infuriating thing is websites that actually limit secure passwords (e.g. "password must be between 6 and 12 characters"). Preventing longer passwords makes little sense if they're salting and hashing; and if they're storing the passwords in plain text (which is just about the only reason to limit the max length to anything less than what a person would reasonably remember), that's even worse.
There was a belief, before the advent of ubiquitous password managers, that allowing passwords to be "too long" would result in people forgetting their password more often, entering it wrong, or some combination which would increase reset requests and ultimately cause people to use worse passwords. Basically "you can't remember a 54 character random password, and you're gonna get pissed and switch to a six character predictable word".
This is now obviously a terrible line of reasoning, but it was only middling bad at the time.
Oh, i guess that makes some sort of sense - obviously I disagree with the conclusion, but I understand it - but it's beyond frustrating when you think "maybe I'll pay this bill online" and see that limit. And even if that is the reasoning for the limit, if they haven't updated their requirements in all that time, I have little faith that they're storing my sensitive information securely.
I feel like most of the sites I’ve seen password limits like this on are financial in nature, where it’s all theatrics - the appearance of security takes precedence over (and in some cases comes at the expense of) actual security.