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?
I hope you’re using a password manager, I recommend bit warden if not.
Password requirements are all attempts at getting people to introduce entropy into their passwords. The length the characters the not allowed characters the allowed characters. All about adding entropy
Restrictions on allowed characters tend to be based on legacy systems and the input state allow. So if you have an input system that only has Latin characters, it would be foolish to allow non-Latin characters into a password, because then people could get stuck unable to login. So typically they reduce to the safest set of characters that all of their systems use. And for some of the older systems that parse passwords, some of the Meta characters could be problematic.
Password length is also down to legacy systems. If you have an old school Solaris system somewhere in your back end, that truncates password fields at 15 characters. Then 15 characters is the max.
BitWarden seems a little dumber at detecting password update submissions than LastPass. Same with detecting when there’s a login field on a page. Really, webdevs should do the most simple-stupid thing and give those fields predictable names like “old_password”/“new_password”/“new_password_retype”. No reason to get creative here.
That’s about it. I switched out of LastPass for a reason and I’m not going back.
It feels like a lot of sites are taking active measures to block the use is password managers, too. I hate those sites. Why I’m the hell would you do that???
Mainly financial sites, in my experience. I also have problems logging into Mastodon, because if I manually type my user and password I get logged in but if I use Bitwarden or even copy/paste it fails.
But also every site where you type in the user name and then submit and it takes you to enter the password - I use a lot of custom emails to avoid spam so I may not remember my username for a given site, but Bitwarden won’t recognize it as a login page (much bigger problem on mobile, which is where I do most of my stuff).
It’s your browser. You can install JavaScript or a browser extension which disallows the no paste input field. So that you can always paste in.
The financial institutions that implement that they’re trying to guard against local copy and paste password theft. Any program can have access to the clipboard. So I understand why they do it, and I understand why it’s annoying.
For financial institutions I highly recommend using something like a Fido 2 key. I’m partial to the yubikey bioseries.
After years of complaining, they finally did something about their hopelessly insecure authentication, only to completely bork it.
Bitwarden could open the site, but couldn’t push the login info. They prohibited pasting, so I had type everything by hand. And they couldn’t even get that prohibition right, because I discovered that I could type a character then CTRL+V to paste, then HOME, DEL.
All of that is written past tense, because it was the last straw. I took my banking elsewhere, despite the fact I now have to drive 2.5 hours if I need to talk to someone in person.
I agree.
Bitwarden is open source and also provides a pretty good user experience.
Now that passkey support is also coming, I like it even more.
Currently a premium member. 10€/year isn’t alot for a good service.
While most of the time, I remember my password, I know I could just snap and forget it right there at any point. Happened to me not once. And I’m in my 20s.
Sometimes when I forget a password, I just start typing and muscle memory kicks in, sometimes it doesn’t.
I guess our brains are not optimized to store long random strings of characters.
You could use a long sentence as your master password or do as I do:
Come up with a way to make up a long seemingly random password from a couple words. Then if/when you forget a password, just remember those words and reconstruct password from them.
Don’t use common dictionary words or anything from popular media, as it could be guessed by attackers.
You can write down algorithm on a piece of paper and keep it somewhere safe.
Words should be related but not directly:
two asteroid names - bad
asteroid name and it’s greek translation - bad
real city name and city name from a book - good
two words that both start with S and end with T - good
If you forget both words, you should be able to remember/look up at least one of them if you still remember how you came up with the word.
I used a passphrase generated from a word, kinda like an acrostic poem.
Exmaple: LEMMY
Lemonade Endeavor Makes Melons Yellow
I know the word that I used to generate my passphrase, I’m just missing one word of the passphrase, but I know the starting letter.
I could theoretically “brute force” all the words that starts with that letter, but I’m just too depressed and unmotivated to solve a captcha for each guess. Maybe I’ll find the missing word, but it could take months.
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I hope you’re using a password manager, I recommend bit warden if not.
Password requirements are all attempts at getting people to introduce entropy into their passwords. The length the characters the not allowed characters the allowed characters. All about adding entropy
Restrictions on allowed characters tend to be based on legacy systems and the input state allow. So if you have an input system that only has Latin characters, it would be foolish to allow non-Latin characters into a password, because then people could get stuck unable to login. So typically they reduce to the safest set of characters that all of their systems use. And for some of the older systems that parse passwords, some of the Meta characters could be problematic.
Password length is also down to legacy systems. If you have an old school Solaris system somewhere in your back end, that truncates password fields at 15 characters. Then 15 characters is the max.
BitWarden seems a little dumber at detecting password update submissions than LastPass. Same with detecting when there’s a login field on a page. Really, webdevs should do the most simple-stupid thing and give those fields predictable names like “old_password”/“new_password”/“new_password_retype”. No reason to get creative here.
That’s about it. I switched out of LastPass for a reason and I’m not going back.
It feels like a lot of sites are taking active measures to block the use is password managers, too. I hate those sites. Why I’m the hell would you do that???
Example please? This has not been my experience
Mainly financial sites, in my experience. I also have problems logging into Mastodon, because if I manually type my user and password I get logged in but if I use Bitwarden or even copy/paste it fails.
But also every site where you type in the user name and then submit and it takes you to enter the password - I use a lot of custom emails to avoid spam so I may not remember my username for a given site, but Bitwarden won’t recognize it as a login page (much bigger problem on mobile, which is where I do most of my stuff).
It’s your browser. You can install JavaScript or a browser extension which disallows the no paste input field. So that you can always paste in.
The financial institutions that implement that they’re trying to guard against local copy and paste password theft. Any program can have access to the clipboard. So I understand why they do it, and I understand why it’s annoying.
For financial institutions I highly recommend using something like a Fido 2 key. I’m partial to the yubikey bioseries.
Prairie Centre Credit Union.
After years of complaining, they finally did something about their hopelessly insecure authentication, only to completely bork it.
Bitwarden could open the site, but couldn’t push the login info. They prohibited pasting, so I had type everything by hand. And they couldn’t even get that prohibition right, because I discovered that I could type a character then CTRL+V to paste, then HOME, DEL.
All of that is written past tense, because it was the last straw. I took my banking elsewhere, despite the fact I now have to drive 2.5 hours if I need to talk to someone in person.
I agree. Bitwarden is open source and also provides a pretty good user experience. Now that passkey support is also coming, I like it even more. Currently a premium member. 10€/year isn’t alot for a good service.
Plus you can self host if you want the save the $10 a year, but its worth it to support the ecosystem
Yes. Exactly. I don’t know why anyone would prefer anything else over Bitwarden if they want a online password manager.
Speaking of Password Managers, PLEASE DO NOT FORGET THAT PASSWORD.
Because that’s gonna be a bit annoying [Very Annoying].
My story: https://reddthat.com/post/1115518
😟
While most of the time, I remember my password, I know I could just snap and forget it right there at any point. Happened to me not once. And I’m in my 20s. Sometimes when I forget a password, I just start typing and muscle memory kicks in, sometimes it doesn’t. I guess our brains are not optimized to store long random strings of characters. You could use a long sentence as your master password or do as I do:
Come up with a way to make up a long seemingly random password from a couple words. Then if/when you forget a password, just remember those words and reconstruct password from them.
I used a passphrase generated from a word, kinda like an acrostic poem.
Exmaple: LEMMY
Lemonade Endeavor Makes Melons Yellow
I know the word that I used to generate my passphrase, I’m just missing one word of the passphrase, but I know the starting letter.
I could theoretically “brute force” all the words that starts with that letter, but I’m just too depressed and unmotivated to solve a captcha for each guess. Maybe I’ll find the missing word, but it could take months.
deleted by creator
Bitwarden F-Droid repo
https://mobileapp.bitwarden.com/fdroid/