Strong Passwords Not As Good As You Think 553
Jamie noticed that Bruce Schneier wrote a piece on a paper on strong passwords that tells us that the old 'strong password' advice that many of us (myself included) regard as gospel might not be as true as we had hoped. They make things hard on users, but are useless against phishing and keyloggers. Everyone can change their password back to 'trustno1' now.
News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
If your computer is hacked than you're boned.
Seems to me that the solution is to have a strong password and keep your computer free of malware.
Is that really so hard?
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, this.
"Security" people who don't know anything about non-IT users like to make password rules that are so obtuse that normal users simply can't deal with them. The result is sticky noted passwords.
Users have to be able to remember their passwords in order for this security to be of any use. Push them beyond that ability, and you're actively making the situation worse.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
So write it down and put it in your wallet with your credit card.
Unless - of course - you routinely tack your credit card to your cubicle wall. No? Didn't think so.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have to enter your credit card number every time you want to access your computer? No? Well that's why it's in your wallet and not more easily accessible.
Re:News at 11 (Score:4, Funny)
Not yet, but that's supposed to be a feature in Windows 7.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Pick one good password, don't let it get cracked, and you'll be fine, and your users/co-workeres will be much happier
That's the way we run our network at home.
Unfortunately, at work it's different. There are several authentication empires large and small, each with differing password complexity requirements and with differing policies on password expiry and minimum difference from previous several passwords. There's the Oracle empire and the Siebel empire and the Notes empire, and two mutually-hostile LDAP empires. There are also a few minor authentication empires specific to other tools. There are probably other authentication empires/ghettoes for tools I don't interact with.
The longest password validity is 90 days, for some systems it's 60 days. The shortest password acceptable to any system is 8 characters. All require upper and lower case, some require number and/or punctuation as well. Some don't count an upper case character if it's the first character in the password. Others don't count a number or punctuation if it's the last character in the password. So upper case, number, and punctuation have to be in the middle. One system requires that at least two characters in the password change type in each update (e.g. number becomes letter). Another system does not ever allow re-use of old passwords, claiming unlimited memory of previous passwords.
The result? A few of the passwords are used regularly enough that they can be remembered, even with the updates every two or three months. Those used intermittently cannot be effectively commited to memory. So passwords are recorded on sticky notes under keyboards, scrawled on margins of wall calenders, on notepads in desk drawers, etc. Some keep them in plain-text files on their laptops. Our systems at home are more secure.
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For companies that don't allow simple incrementing of the password at each change, but rather require almost every character to be changed, I would suggest using a hash function to create a seemingly random but easily regenerated password. For example on Ubuntu the following command will give an easily reproducible password:
echo -n "LongUnchangingBasePasswordSiteNameJan2009" | sha512sum | xxd -r -p | tr -cd [:print:]
Just changing the month will give an entirely different password. Such a password will be di
Re:News at 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
This gets especially problematic when the janitorial staff comes through one night and decides all those pesky post-its (and, indeed, most every paper/seeming clutter on every desk) needs to get cleaned up and thrown out.
Really happened where I worked, once.
But just once.
Even Better (Score:3, Funny)
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, but what I find even more mind numbing is the places that require you to have a password that is between 6 to 10 characters in length (6 for a "strong" password and 10 because their system can't handle passwords any bigger) and must have at least two numbers in them as well as one upper case or some such. If the person/group trying to crack your system know about these requirements (which isn't hard to find out if you plaster it on the logon screen) it greatly reduces the number of permutations they even have to try. You have basically handed them a filter and said Don't bother looking for anything that doesn't contain the following.....
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
If one assumes that the users are lazy and will only do the bare minimum that would mean (in order): 1 upper case letter, 3 lower case letters and 2 numbers. This would translate to 26 ^ 4 * 10 ^ 2 = 45697600 permutations. That wouldn't be very hard to crack. And that is without using dictionaries!
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Funny)
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Directly related item [thedailywtf.com] on The Daily WTF [thedailywtf.com].
The more fine-grained the requirements you can punch into your brute forcer, the faster the hash goes down...
--- Mr. DOS
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Get yourself a little password bruteforcing app. One that does ZIP files as a starter as they are nice and easy.
Play with it. It'll brute force dictionary passwords instantly. 8 letters in a couple of hours. 6 letters in a few minutes. On a crappy HP laptop, I might add.
Add some CAPS, numbers etc and watch the times go in weeks, months, years.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
And I don't blame him sometimes. He was 60+, computers were not his forte and he had to come up with a password that:
A) Expired every 45 days
B) Could not be manually reset to a password that's been used within the last 20 passwords
C) 8+ characters long
D) Numbers
E) Capitals
Hell, I got 3-4 passwords that don't expire on the same sync so I'm slowly losing my mind trying to remember them within the 3 try lockout period. Sure, I can unlock myself but its still crap trying to do it.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
This kind of thinking is, well, disappointing. Yes, it would be "easier" for you the user to not need such a strong password. That would be one way of looking at it. I think it would be easier, too, if I didn't need to look both ways for pedestrians while backing out of my driveway every day. What are the chances that I'm going to hit a pedestrian? Pretty small, but I need to look for them anyway.
There are just some things that we all have to do, even if they are "hard." So may I suggest that instead of complaining that passwords are too hard to remember, perhaps you could try using a couple of tools.
1. Use something like password safe for all those "useless" passwords. You know, the ones for Yahoo, Google, Slashdot, etc.
2. Teach yourself an easy way to create complex passwords. Use the first letter of each word in a silly phrase like "Snoopy Prefers @nchovies 0n his 8rick Oven pizza." (SP@0h8Op) Or pick some other way of remembering these things.
3. Or, install a backup camera so you don't need to look around for those pedestrians.
Just my 2 cents.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
There are just some things that we all have to do, even if they are "hard." So may I suggest that instead of complaining that passwords are too hard to remember, perhaps you could try using a couple of tools. 1. Use something like password safe for all those "useless" passwords. You know, the ones for Yahoo, Google, Slashdot, etc
Spoken like an ivory-tower admin with people skills worse than an angry badger. Some problems with that attitude:
1. While you think your system is special, it's not to us. Yours is one of many systems for which we have to remember passwords.
2. Systems that require such moronically complex passwords also require them to be changed. They also use slightly different rules so that passwords can't be exactly re-used. End result is that I've got about 40 passwords or their variants in recent use. No way I'm remembering that, and I'm smart. You can forget about the secretary.
3. Admins that set up such systems generally forbid the use of password keychains.
End result? At work, I have to remember passwords for about 8-10 systems, all with different rules and password expiration schedules. Naturally, each will lock you out after 3 tries. So what I generally have to do is, each time I've gone more than a week without using a particular system, I get the IT guy to reset the password. Only because I'm one of the good guys, I don't write them down. But I've been sorely tempted.
You can either learn to work with people, or you can keep making unusable edicts that make it impossible for people to follow them. Just know that once you cross the "sticky note" threshold - and you appear to be well over it - your system is far more easily compromised than if you had implemented a sensible security policy in the first place.
What admins usually forget is that security is inherently practical, not theoretical. Hackers will always focus on the weakest part of any secure system, not the strongest. Making it take 100 days instead of 10 to crack a password file doesn't accomplish anything, because they'll move on to another exploit. All you'll do is piss off your users and make it a lot more likely that passwords get written down. As Mitnick showed, the weakest link is usually human, and your approach makes that link far weaker.
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The Security Analyst can care less if you can remember your passwords or not. The real issue is whose fault it's going to be when the system does get compromised. I can tell you right now, it's not going to be the SA. Its all you, the end user! You can fight the good fight for admins and end users, but in the end, SA can care less if you have you password on a sticky note on your monitor. They have covered their ass, and when all your business gets owned. They are going to point their finger right at you.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Funny)
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No, not really.
If people at your office can be trusted, you don't really take a huge risk by having a postit with the password. The complicated password, however, makes it much harder to brute force from the outside, or to brute force a compromised hashed password DB.
A few years back somebody managed to grab the Second Life password data
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If people at your office can be trusted, you don't really take a huge risk by having a postit with the password.
Ahh, I see, so you hang out with the housekeeping staff and fully trust them too. You know, the ones who do the shitty job, are thoroughly underpaid but are easily smart enough to realize that somebody "out there" might find confidential information on your system very, very valuable? Same with the building owners your company leases to, right? You know, 16+ gig flash drives are very cheap and hold a lot of confidential information. Hell, if they're a little more technical than that they'll find a troja
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Do you remember your mother's birthday? Your anniversary? Who won the last 5 World Series? The name of the first girl you had a crush on? What I'd mean if I were to say "Ni!" to an old woman? While you might not know all of them (I have no clue who won the most recent World Series, nor do I care), I'm sure you know all sorts of similarly esoteric information.
People can remember all sorts of information, if it is important enough to them. People look at passwords as inconveniences at best.
If you can't m
Re:News at 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
Strawmen. Those data points don't change every six months to something relatively arbitrary. Even the last world series question (the only one of your questions which EVER changes) has a very finite set of possible correct answers. Even more problematic, the many different systems with passwords usually have different schedules on which passwords need to be changed, and different ways of defining "strong" passwords, so you can't use the same "strong" password across multiple systems. I don't have post-its for my passwords, but the only way I've been able to escape that is by coming up with a system for my passwords which allows me to make minor, memorable variations each time I have to change one of my passwords. If it were just one password, well, okay, but voicemail and multiple system logins each with different password requirements and change-schedules? Some of which I only use intermittently? I'm sorry, but at some point these requirements become completely counterproductive.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Glad to see you read the first paragraph of my post. Did you happen to see the end, where I said that I agreed with the paper, increasing password complexity doesn't solve the problems that we face today, and that I'm engaging my management with an eye towards changing our password policy?
But, since you brought it up, sure those don't change, but we have all sorts of information that we learn every day. If you're a programmer, you might have to learn a new technique, the parameters for a new method invoca
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For one, changing passwords do not improve security. At best, they limit the time when a system is compromised, but almost never improve the security (the only exception is if someone managed to get a hold of an encrypted password file and it takes 7 months to crack a 6 month rotation, but that takes an already compr
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So, use an acronym for your password, but write down the full sentence.
Use the password "Dftpu2jomaw!" and write yourself a note that says "Don't forget to pick up 2 jugs of milk after work!"
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We have this policy on our timekeeping system. I re-use the same password with a number f
Re:News at 11 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
Another problem with password rules that rotate too fast and have too many rules is that you end up with many users who are locked out of their accounts. I imagine if the helpless desk gets 100 requests a day to reset account passwords then after a while they become less careful to ensure that the person requesting a password reset is actually the person that owns the account. Personally the more stupid password rules I encounter the more likely I am to try to come up with a password that is easy to guess (since I will be the one guessing the password in a little while.)
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An example password for such situations
[i1!][a@]m[l1!][e3][e3][t7]
that gives you 144 combinations if your system just requires a mix of letters and not letters, not counting upper-vs-lower, or something like half if your password require letters, numbers, and symbols every time.
Can't remember which you've used recently? Write down past choices using just the letter A for letters, S for numbers, and D for symbols in place of the actual character.
E.g. ADASSSA for i@m133t
That way someone won't mistake it for
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Funny)
Most of mine are planar...
rj
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This month's password is: July2009. It has numbers and capitals. Great!
Next month's password will be: August2009. It has numbers and capitals. Great!
Don't be scared of the rules man. They are there to help you
Re:News at 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:News at 11 (Score:4, Funny)
...using the first line of each song to generate your password... 'I see a little silhouetto of a man' becomes 15al50am
I'm sure you mean "1ttr71tjf" yes?
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So am I if my computer is boned?
Woo hoo! (Score:2, Funny)
Yes! Now i can change my password back to password!
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At least those of us who speak french have much better passwords. Mine is 10 characters long, that's 2 characters better than yours!
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At least those of us who speak french have much better passwords. Mine is 10 characters long, that's 2 characters better than yours!
O yeah! Well my passwords go to 11.. yeah that's right... exactly 1 higher than yours frenchy...
Re:Woo hoo! (Score:5, Funny)
c'mon (Score:4, Funny)
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surely we should all be changing our passwords back to "Joshua"?
Yeah? You want to play a game, mothafucka???
Hang up your punk-ass modem and step down. She-it.
(Okay, I probably need to stop watching The Wire before I go to work.)
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At least it is a reasonable name. If he named his kid Swordfish...
And this is news how? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll repeat what I've said before: Use sentences. (Score:4, Informative)
I advise people to use unusual sentences as passwords.
For example, look at the previous sentence.
It contains uppercase letters, lowercase letters, spaces and punctuation.
It's easy to remember, and hard to guess, so users are unlikely to forget it/write it down.
And even if you did write down your sentence/password near your computer, people might not even guess that it was your password.
limited application (Score:4, Insightful)
In particular many *NIX environments still don't natively allow spaces in passwords, so that approach would fail there.
Re:limited application (Score:4, Informative)
I have used passwords with spaces since the 1990's on AIX,IRIX,HPUX, Solaris and Linux and have only seen that happen on poorly written sql code (deliberatily put there by some ignorant web-developer).
Which environment would that be?
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I tend to use sentences, but instead of using a sentence like: "This sentence would make a crappy password."
I'd reduce it as follows: "Tswmacp." Capital letters where capital letters would be in the sentence, include punctuation, and there you go.
The biggest problem with it is that, in the english language, certain letters are unlikely to ever start a word, so it reduces the frequency a bit, and also, there aren't many numbers, even if you transliterate words like "to" to "2".
So I pull out quotations from b
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Some require uppercase, lowercase and numbers.
Some require specific complexity; most do not
Some require a symbol.
Some don't allow a symbol.
Some require at least 8 characters.
Some allow at most 8 characters.
Really, it's just stupid. Until some standards body issues requirements in internet password practices that financial institutions
Re:limited application (Score:5, Funny)
It's a sticky note with gibberish on the monitor. What could it be.
A friend of mine had a genuinely clever idea for a password: The serial key on the back of the monitor of the guy sitting opposite of him. He has it right in front of him, it's completely impossible to guess, no sticky note giving it away and yet it's written down and won't go away or get lost.
He only has to call IT every other year when they upgrade monitors.
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Re:I'll repeat what I've said before: Use sentence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll repeat what I've said before: Use sentence (Score:4, Funny)
3...
4 PROFIT!.
It's a reward for whoever cracks it - they'll probably profit.
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So, uh... passphrases?
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They'd also have to be a pretty good typist, since they can't see what they've typed. Plus, the password box doesn't visibly change to reflect the extra keystrokes after it's full, so you can't tell if you hit an extra letter. If you only get 3 tries before your account locks out, this might not be a very good idea.
Then of course most passwords can't be longer than a certain length, which the other reply already mentioned.
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I agree, except to improve upon this, you can just use the first few letters of each word, or even just the first letter.
this keeps the passwords reasonably short which is good both for typing quickly (and from just finger muscle memory) as well as being better in cases where passwords are truncated by the system inuse.
moreover, beyond the first few letters the entropy added by the remaining letters is dropping swiftly so they add less protection if someone know you are using whole words.
Additionally if you
Re: (Score:2)
2) You need to have symbols in there (e.g. '*')
3) You need to change this once per month
4) You have multiple systems which require passwords
5) Passwords may not be repeated
All of this = reasons why your password method may not be the best.
There is a reason why ma-bell made phone numbers seven digits long and it's not because ma-bell anticipated the need to use every 10 million number combinations...it's beca
Re:I'll repeat what I've said before: Use sentence (Score:3, Informative)
You should set your password to,
I am a pedophile and this encrypted partition contains my child pornography.
That way, if a court orders you to reveal your password, you can plead the 5th Amendment.
-- 77IM
PS. I am not a pedophile, and my encrypted partition no child pornography, just pirated movies and TV shows.
Simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
No problems there! [bbc.co.uk]
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I've often thought about this, and my only concern would be:
If one works with, or has access to "truly useful" (read highly "valuable") data, then one is subjecting ones self to losing a digit (or eye, or something) :-)
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
We should have biometrics, passwords, and proximity smartcards.
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In a word, no. Biometrics is only a part of identifying someone and controlling access. In essence, classic security thought says that there are three things to authorizing and authenticating a principal:
1. Something you are
2. Something you have
3. Something you know
So if biometrics provided #1, a smart card could be #2, and a password could be #3.
I've known of several high-security installations that required all three things. A thumb print, the smart card, and a passphrase (or passcode) to go through a
Throwing the baby out with the bathingwater? (Score:3, Insightful)
So because something that's good against brute-force attacks, but isn't against phishing and keyloggers, we should stop doing that? Phishing and keylogging are a result of strong passwords. So you need to implement adequate measures against those instead of saying strong passwords are useless.
If users have a hard time remembering their passwords, train them in it. Using phrases from which you take letters of which some are substituted with letters are very easy to remember for a user, yet very hard to bruteforce because you can make them quite long easily.
Re:Throwing the baby out with the bathingwater? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
the old 'strong password' advice that many of us (myself included) regard as gospel might not be as true as we had hoped. They make things hard on users, but are useless against phishing and keyloggers.
It's like saying that the locks on our doors aren't good enough anymore because people are breaking into our windows -- so we should stop locking our doors? Doesn't make sense either.
Re:Throwing the baby out with the bathingwater? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more like pointing out that a $25 lock is probably sufficient for a house with 25 glass windows (as opposed to a $100 lock).
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Re:Throwing the baby out with the bathingwater? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like saying that the locks on our doors aren't good enough anymore because people are breaking into our windows -- so we should stop locking our doors?
More along the lines of: there ain't no sense in fitting a steel door if you live in a tent.
The main purpose of most door locks is not to stop determined people getting in at all, but to ensure that they have to break something in order to do so and can't claim some innocent excuse.
Its probably better to regard most user-level, non-banking passwords in much the same way, and concentrate on protecting the really sensitive stuff.
Also, apart from the "long passwords encourage writing down" issue, long passwords + frequent forced changes = more forgotten passwords = more demands on support staff to reset passwords = less scrutiny of reset requests.
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If you have to break your own windows to get in about once a month - because your ridiculously complicated lock keeps locking you out - and it takes a week to replace those windows - then you probably need a simpler/less 'secure' lock. You might even be better off without a lock....
T
News for who? (Score:2, Redundant)
...but are useless against phishing and keyloggers....
No kidding. Here's another news flash for you, computers do not run on magic crystals.
Sounds dumb to me (Score:3, Insightful)
But maybe it's just the summary? I'll go RTFA right after this, or at least skim it. But since phishing and keyloggers are only two threats, and people can still guess passwords (or brute-force them) I think I'll keep using randomly generated passwords.
"Wrote a piece" apparently means "wrote a sentence" because all Bruce said about the paper is that it was "Interesting", then he C&P'd the abstract. Why not link directly?
Okay, I read the first page of the paper and they say you only need about 20 bits of password so long as there is a three strikes policy in place. However, this ignores the type of attack where a remote hole allows retrieval of a file, and that hole is used to retrieve the password list. There are also other attacks which would allow one to get ahold of your encrypted password, not least by sniffing, which can then be brute-forced without having to worry about three-strikes policies.
In other words, keep your complicated passwords, they are still necessary to defeat dictionary attacks. Security is not something you can buy in the store, it is a mindset that you must adopt. The more factors of security, the better. If you can't memorize a complex password after using it twenty or thirty times, you should start playing memory games or something. Even I can do that and my memory is poor enough to be a liability (and always has been since childhood.) We're all different and excel in different ways, but you owe it to yourself to sharpen certain skills.
I guess the bottom line is that I'd be concerned about employing someone who can't remember a password. You write it down until you memorize it, you treat that piece of paper as precious and secret, you burn it and scatter the ashes (or eat it, or whatever) when you no longer need it. It shouldn't be that difficult for a modern human who can understand how to operate a computer.
My password (Score:5, Funny)
I sometimes set my password to ******** It sounds stupid but it has two advantages:
1. I know that I've typed in a * because I can see it
and, most importantly
2. When I have to repeat my password to confirm it, I can just copy and paste the previous field, saving me literally seconds of typing
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I sometimes set my password to ********
Your password is hunter2 [bash.org]?
Weak passwords (Score:2)
The summary is missing an important point. The article suggests that weak passwords can be made secure by limiting the number of guesses allowed using a three strikes rule.
However, this solution has some problems. If any old password is allowed, there are 10-20 passwords which are most commonly chosen by all users. These are still likely to be guessed by an automated guessing system.
Also, the three strikes rule can be circumvented by using a botnet based attack. A botnet of 50,000 nodes would be allowed 150
Now if only people would take this into account... (Score:5, Insightful)
I signed up for a forum a couple of weeks ago. I used the same generic password that I use for every other throw-away site out there, so it's easy to remember the damn thing. When I clicked submit, I got an error message telling me that my password needs a number in it. So I append a '1' on the end to satisfy the filter, and click submit again. I get *another* error message telling me that it needs to be mixed case, so I capitalized the first letter. Now I'll forget the password and never be able to guess the damn thing again, so the next time I want to log in to whatever forum this was, I'll need it to send me an email with a reminder.
It would be really nice if they'd just turn those damn filters off. This forum site isn't a bank. I couldn't give two shits if someone hacks my account there, not that my regular password is particularly guessable anyway. Seriously, I my password to your dipshit forum shouldn't have to contain mixed case, three numbers, nine punctuation marks, Egyptian fucking hieroglyphs, and that goddamn symbol the artist formerly known as Prince uses. Failing that, it would be nice if they at least provided some instructions with the password box that say something to the point of "Capitalize the first letter of your generic password and append a 1."
[/rant]
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T
Hide userid - seems like a good idea (Score:2)
Like the paper says userids aren't secrets but non-secret userids make spam easier. Many companies use initial + last name as the user id: eg jsmith. If they also added a random 4 digit number: eg jsmith1234. It would make guessing userids harder for spam. And make unauthorized login attempts harder.
The Problem With Passwords (Score:2)
What happens? People WILL use post-it-notes with their passwords. Security can bitch and moan all they want about this but the alternative
Defense-in-depth (Score:3, Interesting)
Passwords that are too weak of course invite brute-force attacks. However, we find that relatively weak passwords, about 20 bits or so, are sufficient to make brute-force attacks on a single account unrealistic so long as a "three strikes" type rule is in place.
This may be statistically true, but isn't it missing the point of defense-in-depth? Why rely on three-strikes to catch brute force attempts, when you can also have a password that resists brute force in the first place.
Strong passwords may be overkill (Score:2)
Best Practices (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the article (cited by the citation):"Users are frequently reminded of the risks: the popular press often reports on the dangers of ïnancial fraud and identity theft, and most ïnancial institutions have security sections on their web-sites which oïer advice on detecting fraud and good password practices. As to password practices traditionally users have been advised to . . . "
-Choose strong passwords
-Change their passwords frequently
-Never write their passwords down
I would suggest that this is a case for the popular quip: "Pick two".
Which passwords are important? (Score:2)
Strong passwords don't help against stupidity (Score:2)
A strong password is a good thing to protect your front door. Of course it is useless if you tell it everybody (phishing) or if you install password logging tools to tell the password a special group of people. But that has nothing to do with the password, it has to do with human behavior. A strong password is good, but it is useless without other security measures. This is no surprise. I hear the loud noise of a rice sack falling over. If I am not mistaken, it comes form China.
Dict' attack is sooooo 2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody brute forces anymore. Nobody. Any sensible password challenge/response system (I doubt there is such a thing if it relies only on that, but I ramble...) will lock you out and disable the account after so many tries, and usually the amount of tries is far lower than the threshold where guessing yields a meaningful chance to succeed. If it doesn't, steer clear of such a system altogether, if it doesn't come up with one of the simplest security "features", it probably is hellish insecure altogether.
Take, just for example, various game account or freemail system that let you retry infinitly, because their support would be flooded if they locked you out after 3 tries. Yes, you could keep guessing. And probably it is done. So a "strong" password means more security. Usually, no. Because they invariably also feature some braindead password recovery feature (ya know, the supersecret questions like "what was the name of your pet dog", again with infinite tries) that is usually even easier to defeat than the password guessing game.
You can, essentially, really go back to "12345" style passwords. There are way more than three possible easy to remember passwords, from birthdays to loved ones' names to even your CC pin number, and three being the usual number of retries before lockout. And without lockouts, the average "guess-hacker" won't go for your password. They go for the other venues that are usually far easier to break.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Multiple Systems (Score:3, Insightful)
yup (Score:3, Interesting)
Forcing users to change passwords does nothing against keyloggers either. But it definitely makes it easier to tell when a user has changed their password.
They'll type the current known password, then tab or click, then type some new cryptic garbage, then tab or click, then the same cryptic garbage.
But the worst possible password constraint I can think of is limiting the maximum number of allowed characters. I can think of absolutely no good reason for this restriction, yet large companies, such as Cedar Point's online reservation system posses this restriction.
threat model (Score:4, Insightful)
As all things in security, it's not black and white.
What exactly does "strong" mean? That's the important password.
In most circumstances, your threat model why you need a "strong" password is password guessing. It is rarely an actual brute-force attack, because most systems these days prevent a brute-force attack (e.g. they lock you out or reset your password to a random one that they send you per mail if you try it more than X times).
If your threat model does not include brute-force attacks, what you need is a "difficult to guess" password. That means you don't use "password" or "secret" and you don't use your own name, the name of your significant other or dog, your birthday and so on.
And that's all there is to it, really. All the bullshit about using numbers, special characters, etc. is just that - bullshit. It's defense against a threat that's not important anymore.
IANAL, but I am a security professional. Most of my passwords contain no numbers, and where the systems enforce them, there's usually a single number at the end or beginning. But I can type all my passwords in about a second on a standard keyboard. That makes shoulder-surfing a lot more difficult. In fact, I can make fairly good guesses at most "hunt and peck" people's passwords when I watch them type it in from across a small room. And the more difficult it is, the longer it takes them to type it in, and the easier it is for me to spot it.
So it all depends on your threat model, as always. Know what you need to defend against, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how you need to defend.
It's what the password's strong against (Score:4, Interesting)
Conventional "strong" passwords protect against someone trying to guess or brute-force the password. They're really good at this.
The problem is, few attackers try to guess or brute-force passwords anymore. It's too time-consuming and too readily detected. Most of them will try to get you to tell them the password by one means or another. Phishing e-mails, keyloggers, traffic sniffing, man-in-the-middle attacks, the whole point of all of them's to get your password directly without having to figure out what it is. And against that sort of attack, "secret" is precisely, exactly as secure as "wkL3jfo*Zle". To guard against those attacks you need to strengthen things other than the password itself. And part of what you have to harden against attack is the user themselves, which makes it unlikely you'll succeed.
you know (Score:3, Insightful)
My bank password? Yes, that should be strong. The forum where I go for auto repair advice? No, I shouldn't have to memorize an 8 character password with at least one upper case, one number, and one symbol character.
Re:HEY! (Score:4, Funny)
Ha! Dumbass. You need a better password now, like the one I have on my luggage: 1-2-3-4-5
Re:HEY! (Score:5, Funny)
1-2-3-4-5? That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my planetary air shield!
Re:HEY! (Score:4, Funny)
1-2-3-4-5?
Newbs. The highly secure password on US Nuclear weapons used to be:
00000000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link [wikipedia.org]
On the other hand, at least the US weapons actually have locks. Other countries' nukes don't.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thankfully I use KeePass [keepass.info] myself, so I have everywhere *different* ~20 chars totally random password. If you also use keyfile to protect the container, a trojan getting your master password doesn't matter. Some of them might also be stupid enough not to monitor the clipboard when you're pasting the password. And even if they do, you wont give out password to bunch of websites, services, email, servers etc at once and you're protected against malicious admins or people hacking servers to get passwords because
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Keepass only works so well if you have a keylogger AND configure it properly. If you have a trojan + keylogger where they can log the entry and download the file, the whole concept is moot.
figure out your password + copy your credential + copy your keepass file? It's not like keepass originated yesterday.
There is no perfect solution. There are "best practices" and thats about the best an average person can hope for.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Keepass will work fine and dandy until enough people are using it where it's worth exploiting. The targets of most of this stuff aren't individual users. They're the broad audience, which a percentage will do a compromising activity.
I'll admit, I once worked for a company who sent spam. This was before the days of it's evilness, and laws, and ... well, what it's become.
The general thought at the time was, for every 100 emails sent out, there would be approxima
Re: (Score:2)