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NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 1 month 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.)