this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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549
NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
152 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Here is the text of the NIST sp800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They might mean well, but the reason we require a special character and number is to ensure the amount of possible characters are increased.

The problem with this sort of requirement is that most people will solve it the laziest way. In this case, "ah, I can't use «hospital»? Mkay, «Hospital1» it is! Yay it's accepted!". And then there's zero additional entropy - because the first char still has 26 states, and the additional char has one state.

Someone could of course "solve" this by inserting even further rules, like "you must have at least one number and one capital letter inside the password", but then you get users annotating the password in a .txt file because it's too hard to remember where they capitalised it or did their 1337.

Instead just skip all those silly rules. If offline attacks are such a concern, increase the min pass length. Using both lengths provided by the guidelines:

  • 8 chars, mixing:minuscules, capitals, digits, and any 20 special chars of your choice, for a total of 82 states per char. 82⁸ = 2*10¹⁵ states per password.
  • 15 chars, using only minuscules, for a total of 26 states per char. Number of states: 26¹⁵ = 1.7*10²¹ states per password.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

But they mess that up with their 8 char rule

Verifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.

I'd they'd just said shall require 15 but not require special chars then that's okay, but they didn't.

Then you end up with the typical shitty manager who sees this, and says they recommend 8 and no special chars, and that's what it becomes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't think that the entity should be blamed for the shitty manager. Specially given that the document has a full section (appendix A.2) talking about pass length.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The entity knows people will follow what they say for minimums. There's already someone in the comment section saying they're now fighting what these lax rules allow.

Edit: stupid product managers will jump at anything that makes it easier for their users and dropping it to 8, no special characters, and no resets is the new thing now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

What you're proposing is effectively the same as "they should publish inaccurate guidelines that do not actually represent their informed views on the matter, misleading everybody, to pretend that they can prevent the stupid from being stupid." It defeats the very reason why guidelines exist - to guide you towards the optimal approach in a given situation.

And sometimes the optimal approach is not a bigger min length. Convenience and possible vectors of attack play a huge role; if

  • due to some input specificity, typing out the password is cumbersome, and
  • there's no reasonable way to set up a password manager in that device, and
  • your blocklist of compromised passwords is fairly solid, and
  • you're reasonably sure that offline attacks won't work against you, then

min 8 chars is probably better. Even if that shitty manager, too dumb to understand that he shouldn't contradict the "SHOULD [NOT]" points without a good reason to do so, screws it up. (He's likely also violating the "SHALL [NOT]" points, since he used the printed copy of the guidelines as toilet paper.)