• Meldroc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And despite security recommendations, too many IT depts still force password resets every 90 days…

    And people confronted with this change their password from “p@55w0rd!1” to “p@55w0rd@2”. Yep extra-secure!

    • chrischryse@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I work in the IT section of a bank and they force a change every 30 days and can only have an 8 character password no more no less 🙃

    • nomadjoanne@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ideally we’d all use password managers, but I’m aware 99% of peoole don’t. Even with one, it’s frankly a pain in the butt to be nagged about changing it. “Man, my passwords are 20 random characters. I don’t need yo reset ot unless you’ve had a breach.”

      • Surface_Detail@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Password managers are great. Until you need to log in with a new device or a device that’s not yours.

        Oh, the sixteen digit randomly generated password with two alphanumeric characters in it? Sure I remember that.

        • criitz@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          You gotta use word-based passcodes instead of random jibberish. That way you can quickly read it from your phone and type it in.

    • AlecSadler@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A job I quit about 6mos ago required monthly changes. It was awful. And, yes, it absolutely led to me just incrementing a number at the end. I knew it was time to quit when I was about to hit double digit numbers.

        • AlecSadler@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It was a joke.

          But also, holding a shitty toxic job for 10mos took a mental health toll.

          But also, I don’t know, in some cases that might be good advice. Since 2020 I’ve changed jobs every 6-10mos and I’m making triple what I made in 2019, so that’s nice.

    • Joe@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      @278 and going strong, across 7 companies. One time, just to mix things up, I used an exclamation mark instead. It was exhilerating. /s

    • The_v@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Some IT guys have caught on to this and require 2 digits difference.

      So “ThisJobSucks#11” becomes “ThisJobSucks#22”

        • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          Well they don’t need to store it to a drive. You just entered your old password in order to login and authorise your password change.

          It’ll still be in memory against your session.

        • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Used to have monthly changes for a Microsoft account. When trying to change, it said “You used this password 6 months ago, please use another”, besides the “passwords needs to be at least this different” message. Clearly they are storing them, not sure if they’re stored cleartext or they’re decrypting them on the fly somehow

          • psilocybin@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            You should not be able to decrypt a password, passwords aren’t encrypted but hashed, they would be insecure would they be encrypted.

            Hashing differs from encryption in that it is irreversible, because two or more strings might result in the same hash if the hashing function is applied to them (hashing is not injective).

            But since your password will always yield the same hash you can compare the two hashes and if they are equal you are considered authenticated. If you try to log in with a different password (or even the hash of the correct password) then it will produce a different hash resulting in a failed authentication attempt

            The way crackers get a password if they have the hash is by guessing pw candidates and using the hash function on them, if its the same as the hash they have they found the/a valid password. The guessing can be quite involved and with enough time and data about a victim often 12-13 digit passwords with special characters and all can be cracked - If the victim used a somewhat mnemonic pw that is. Generated pws from a password safe are much safer (but usually also longer).

            In your case I suspect MS was storing a history of hashes which is not advisable as it gives potential crackers more to work with, but its way less bad then storing plain text or encrypting passwords

        • StimpyMGS@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          No you don’t need to store anything in clear text to check password parameters

          • Xanvial@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            But you need to know previous password if the objective is to make sure there’s at least two characters difference compared to new password

              • psilocybin@discuss.tchncs.de
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                1 year ago

                I mean “because password hashes” is basically my original rational so not sure it qualifies as a counter argument.

                But the link you provide is more explicit:

                When the user enters the new password, the system generates the variations of the new password entered, hashes each one of them, and compares each hash against the old password’s hash. If any of the hash matches, it throws an error. Else, it successfully changes the password

                It is possible to hash all 1 character variations I guess, I kinda doubt that it is done often (does anyone know a library?).

                I guess complexity increases linearly so password length is might not severely limit this mechanism. It would be interesting to see a calculation of how long it takes for a long password can to calculate all possibilities for 1 char variations for utf-8 or other charsets

                Thanks for sharing the link!

        • Reliant1087@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You could take the old password, change one or two letters and compare the hash to the hash of the new password?

          • psilocybin@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            That’s the point though.

            You’re not supposed to have the old password. If you had the old password you could just compare it to the new password.

            The only way you can do it is to take the new password and make a hash for every possible single-character variation and compare them all to the old hash

            • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              They shouldn’t be storing the old password hashed, either. Expired password hashes should be destroyed like any other potentially-sensitive information that is no longer business critical.

              There is a reason hackers look to get users tables even though the passwords are hashed. Because with enough of them and enough time, they can usually figure out plaintext. Giving them 10 previous hashed passwords for each user is just increasing the hypothetical risk.

              • psilocybin@discuss.tchncs.de
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                1 year ago

                You’re right ofc if you wanted to make a general remark, but wrong if you thought that was what I was implying. Never store hash histories, kids!

            • Reliant1087@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Sorry, that’s what I meant as well :) Came out upside down when I wrote. We used to figure out shitty ISP router passwords this way by having a table of common passwords and their hashes.

      • Narjah@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I college we had to change our password every semester. Guess who added the semester number onto the end of their password. Hint: everyone.

        Same as a government job that required monthly password changes. Well, at least those people had more security than the post-it note on the monitor people

      • Default_Defect@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        NavyExchange!(ddmm of password change) for as long as I worked there, it was really only to use a register though, I had nothing compromising behind the password lock.

    • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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      1 year ago

      And despite security recommendations, too many IT depts still force password resets every 90 days…

      It could be for contractual or for insurance reasons. We have some contracts with government agencies that require it, and our cyberinsurance also does. Even though NIST has been recommending for years to do long passphrase + MFA and no reset unless you suspect compromise.

      So yeah, the reason behind this might not be just plain incompetence.

    • Stuka@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      The worst is when you have a bunch of independent systems that all have their own login info, all configured by the dame IT department, all with different forced reset timers.

    • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I’ve had arguments with clients’ IT security about this in the past where they demanded forced password resets. Citing NIST controls that insist you should avoid them was apparently insufficient.