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.
I once registered an account with a random ~25 characters long password (Keepass PM) for buying tickets on https://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.
EDIT: btw, the character limit was 12
PayPal did the same. Registration took 40 characters, login only half of that. Editing the login form didn’t work unfortunately.
It’s pretty stupid because the longer the password the more secure it is.
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.
That is a huge red flag if ever given as a reason, you never store the password.
You store a hash which is the same length regardless of the password.Youre right lol. I forgot that hash lengths are different from the actually password length.
Although at some point you’ll get collisions, but I don’t think that’s actually an issue. It still equally hard to guess a password from the hash, there will just be some solutions that are much longer than others.
The cap should actually be due to the hashing algorithm. Every password should be the exact same length once it is salted and hashed, so the actual length of the password doesn’t make a difference in regards to database size. The hash will be a set length, so the storage requirements will be the same regardless. Hashing algorithms have a maximum input length. IIRC the most popular ones return a result of 64-255 characters, and cap at 128 characters for input; Even an input of just “a” would return a 64 character hash. But the salt is also counted in that limit. So if they’re using a 32 character salt, then the functional cap would be 96 characters.
Low character caps are a huge red flag, because it means they’re likely not hashing your password at all. They’re just storing them in plaintext and capping the length to save storage space, which is the first mortal sin of password storage.
You can easily get the hash of whole files, there is no input size constraint with most hashing functions.
Special password hashing implementations do have a limit to guarantee constant runtime, as there the algorithm always takes as long as the worst-case longest input. The standard modern password hashing function (bcrypt) only considers the first 72 characters for that reason, though that cutoff is arbitrary and could easily be increased, and in some implementations is. Having differences past the 72nd character makes passwords receive the same hash there, so you could arbitrarily change the password on every login until the page updates their hashes to a longer password hashing function, at which point the password used at next login after the change will be locked in.
You never store passwords. They should be hashed and salted.
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.
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
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
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
Flaptop Bird
That must have done a lot of dawizard to their reputation.
As long as their login page also does that :p
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.
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.
We have a customer, a big international corporation, that has very specific rules for their intranet passwords:
- Must contain letters
- Must contain numbers
- Must contain special characters
- No repeats
- Passwords must be changed every two months
- Not the same password as any of the last seven
- PASSWORDS MUST BE EXACTLY EIGHT CHARACTERS LONG
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.
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.
It also says “must not be the same as any of the last seven passwords used” so I can only take “no repeats” to mean no repeated characters.
Requiring passwords to be exactly 8 characters is especially ridiculous because even if they’re cheaping out on bytes of storage, that’s completely cancelled out by the fact that they’re storing the last seven passwords used.
You’re right, I didn’t noticed the 7 passwords line.
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.
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-related company. Because, surely, none of those would do that ever.
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.
I just use a catch-all email domain. It’s functionally similar to a hide-my-email address, except the email addresses are much easier to read and remember.
Every single email that hits my domain goes to the same inbox. So Target@{my domain} and Walmart@{my domain} both hit the same inbox. And if I start seeing spam addressed to Target@{my domain} then I know Target sold my info. I can easily filter everything to that address straight to spam, with the exception of any senders ending in “@target.com”
It means my shit gets automatically sorted into neat little folders before it ever even hits my inbox. I can still get the birthday coupons, while all of the spam quietly vanishes into the spam inbox abyss.
I had delusions of trying to keep track of which address is sold by who which is why I did the hide my email addresses. But I’ve always kept separate personal and spam accounts. This was my attempt at combining to a single account.
I used to do this, but then why revealing even my domain. I have bitwarden integrated with simplelogin, and I get service_garbage@aliasdomain.tld
This way I can easily filter with prefix matching (if I want to), but don’t reveal anything at all about me. Also much easier to be consistent, block senders etc. Plus, I can send emails from all those addresses if I ever need (e.g., support).
168! Don’t hold back - everything gets a unique email address, a generated password, unique username and profile info.
It’s only the damn phone number that can be used to connect my data. Can’t do anything about that.
I have a google voice number for that. Most things no longer accept it though.
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?
So long as attempts aren’t per IP and or ipv6 isn’t allowed
And as long as they don’t have an unknown database leak, negating the attempt limit.
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.
Is there any specific reason to using 31 random characters instead of 32?
I’m not the one you’re asking, but I’ve had a case where using the maximum number lead to login issues. A character less did not have issues. Must have been an off-by-one implementation issue (maybe a text terminator character). 32 is a power of two number. Seems like a reasonable approach to evade such issues categorically - at the cost of a character by default of course.
Yes, haha, I saw your other comment about this off-by-one issue. Interesting that it happens at all.
Illogical meat brain that thinks odd numbers are more random that even I guess.
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.
What’s more frustrating is when the password creation page is silently cutting off too long passwords and don’t inform you about it.
There’s a site I use that does that on the password reset page, but not when logging in. So when using a long password it’s as if the reset never works. Took me ages to figure out what was going wrong.
Oh, I hate this one
I have a “cuts off special chars, wtf” somewhere in my password store.
Back in the day, long time ago, Unix would do that, and limit user silently to 8 characters.
Which then wasn’t great, but a good password would be hard to break even at only 8 characters with equipment of the time.
We would do a cracking test against the user passwords periodically and ding users who got cracked. Well one user was shocked because they thought their 16 character password was super secure and there’s no way we would crack it. So we cited her password and she was shocked she went through so much trouble only for the computer to throw away half her awesome password.
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.
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…
i thought that practice died like 20 years ago
That means the breach is imminent, but at least you won’t need to worry about other accounts when it happens. Just be sure you don’t give them any kind of PII or financial data to save. No, you can’t save my card data to make shopping easier, because you’re almost certainly going to have a data breach next month, and drag your heels about disclosing it, giving hackers plenty of time to commit a bunch of fraud using all of the cards on file.
friendica does this.
…wut? Really?
Here’s your password, remember to write it down on your password post-it!
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.
That sounds like the limitations of an ancient mainframe system. If so, then someone trying to brute force their way in would be more likely to crash the system instead.
I don’t have it in me
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. BUT NO SPACES ALLOWED!!!
This is because of something called entropy we never even read about so we have zero understanding of it. Of course combined with lousy programming, so safety is all on you.Making all these possibilities OPTIONAL would actually make for safer passwords (higher entropy), as would using multiple words separated by spaces. The 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.
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.
PASSWOR
‘Sorry but this password is already taken’
By user abc@example.com
That sounds like a game. Guess the word[s].
-
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.
I once got locked out of an HP printer because it chopped off the last few characters of a password. Only figured it out because somebody had made a comment online about password length
Experienced a site some years ago that let me I put however long password I wanted (my default is 52 in my password manager), but turns out it only used the first 20 or so.
At least they tell you. I signed up with websites that just cut the password after the 12th character. No way of signing in with the password again (not without trying a couple of times, at least)
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
EDIT: I think there should be a law against blocking password managers for filling in fields. Any brute force bots are going to submit HTTP requests directly anyway; no one is hitting the DOM to do that
think there should be a law against blocking password managers for filling in fields.
I’ve never heard of anyone trying to do that. I couldn’t even imagine how a website could detect a password manager.
I’ve had banks do it in the past. It’s not that they can “detect” the password manager, they just use a method that’s incompatible with them.
They have a fake input field and capture keypress events via JavaScript directly from the dom, then just make it look like you typed in to the input field. They don’t read the password from the input field, they build it up in memory from those key press events.
It also completely breaks accessibility software, which is the main reason I think the industry moved away from doing it for the most part.
I’ve seen a couple of times. It’s the same ones that block copy/paste on password fields. The workaround is to write a short python script using pyautogui or similar to “type” out the clipboard content.
