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 always thought banks (of all places) had the most ridiculous requirements. What, a 5 character pin to get read access to most of my financial data? Are you kidding me? That’s like securing your bike with a numbers lock
It is bad programming. Specifically it is very bad security (especially setting a maximum length - that is just ridiculous). I think websites should not rely too much on passwords anyway. They should be designed under the assumption that attackers will fairly commonly get access to user passwords, and therefore not let someone do too much damage from simply being able to login to your account.
Non-ASCII characters can cause troubles because of different encodings and because you may need to type them on a machine where corresponding keyboard layout is missing.
The password length limit is nothing short of stupid.
My mother’s password for everything got compromised recently. I told her to think of a sentence that will never happen and to write it down and store it somewhere safe.
She remembered it instantly.
Oh, and I made her a password manager
Something like that is my master password! Well, it is a sentence with l33tspe4k and numbers, colons and stuff
I’m always reminded of this when I see arbitrarily low caps on password character lengths.
Recently signed up on a site that limited passwords to 11 characters. Why? Like, seriously, why?
My passwords use the full set of characters I can type by hand on a standard US qwerty keyboard, and I’ve only run into a few sites that have complained and made me use something simpler. PayPal is one of them. Some of the others are Zenni Optical, eBay, and FedLoan.
In total that’s about 8% of my accounts. So the vast majority of sites seem to let you use whatever, at least. I only use 15 characters so I have no comments on length. I am equally annoyed when a new site makes me use simpler passwords.
Is it bad programming
No, it’s bad requirements, well ok maybe the programmer came up with the requirements too.