NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules
Proposed guidelines aim to inject badly needed common sense into password hygiene.
Here is the text of the NIST sp800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines.
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Reworded rules for clarity:
- Min required length must be 8 chars (obligatory), but it should be 15 chars (recommended).
- Max length should allow at least 64 chars.
- You should accept all ASCII plus space.
- You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
- Don't demand composition rules (e.g. "u're password requires a comma! lol lmao haha" tier idiocy)
- Don't bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there's evidence of compromise.
- Don't store password hints that others can guess.
- Don't prompt the user to use knowledge-based authentication.
- Don't truncate passwords for verification.
I was expecting idiotic rules screaming "bureaucratic muppets don't know what they're legislating on", but instead what I'm seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible.
NIST generally knows what they're doing. Want to overwrite a hard drive securely? NIST 800-88 has you covered. Need a competition for a new block cipher? NIST ran that and AES came out of it. Same for a new hash with SHA3.
NIST generally knows what they're doing
For now, at least. Could change after Inauguration Day.
Didn’t know about sha3.
I hate that anyone has to be told not to truncate passwords. Like even if you haven't had any training at all, you'd have to be advanced stupid to even come up with that idea in the first place.
Microsoft used to do that. I made a password in the late 90's for a we service and I found out that it truncated my password when they made it after it warned my my password was too long when I tried to log in. It truncated at 16 characters.
The weirdest one I found was a site that would only check to see if what you entered started with the correct password. So if your password was hunter2 and you tried hunter246, it would let you in.
Which means not only were they storing the password, but they had to go out of their way to use the wrong kind of string comparison.
USAA does this. I renentl learned that, when I updated my password a few years back to my personal standard number of characters, everything was good until someone mentioned this fuck-up in a thread. USAA only checks the first... 16? characters. I assume it just discards anything beyond that. Other users say that it warns and doesn't let you enter more than that during password creation, but it/my pw mgr sure didn't care, as I have a password several fold that limit. I took out a couple characters from my 'set' password, and it still logged in just fine. 16, just fine. 15, error.
Fucking wild.
I used to work there. I reported this bug every quarter until a VP told me to stop…
The LM password hash (predecessor to NTLM) was calculated in two blocks of 7 characters from that truncated 14 characters. Which meant the rainbow table for that is much smaller than necessary and if your password is not 14 characters, then technically part of the hash is much easier to brute force, because the other missing characters are just padded with null.
Can you elaborate further? Why would someone want to truncate passwords to begin with?
To save a few megabytes of text in a database somewhere. Likely the same database that gets hacked.
Which shouldn't even matter because passwords are salted and hashed before storing them, so you're not actually saving anything. At least they better be. If you're not hashing passwords you've got a much bigger problem than low complexity passwords.
The place that truncates passwords is probably not the place to look for best practices when it comes to security. :-)
Hashing passwords isn't even best practice at this point, it's the minimally acceptable standard.
What is the best practice currently?
Use a library. It's far too easy for developers or project managers to fuck up the minimum requirements for safely storing passwords.
But, if you are wanting to do it by hand...
Salt the hash with something unique to that specific user so identical passwords have different hashes
Isn't that... the very definition of a Salt? A user-specific known string? Though my understanding is that the salt gets appended to the user-provided password, hashed and then checked against the record, so I wouldn't say that the hash is salted, but rather the password.
Also using a pepper is good practice in addition to a salt, though the latter is more important.
Sorta. Not really.
Key derivation algorithms are still hashes in most practical ways. Though they're derived directly from block ciphers in most cases, so you could also say they're encrypted. Even though people say to hash passwords, not encrypt them.
I find the whole terminology here to be unenlightening. It obscures more than it understands.
A KDF is not reversible so it's not encryption (a bad one can be brute forced or have a collision, but that's different from decrypting it even if the outcome is effectively the same). As long as you're salting (and ideally peppering) your passwords and the iteration count is sufficiently high, any sufficiently long password will be effectively unrecoverable via any known means (barring a flaw being found in the KDF).
The defining characteristic that separates hashing from encryption is that for hashing there is no inverse function that can take the output and one or more extra parameters (secrets, salts, etc.) and produce the original input, unlike with encryption.
OK. How do you reconcile that with "Hashing passwords isn't even the best practice at this point"? Key derivation functions are certainly the recommended approach these days. If they are hashes, then your earlier post is wrong, and if they aren't hashes, then your next post was wrong.
The rest of that sentence is important. Hashing passwords is the minimum practice, not best practice. You should always be at least hashing passwords. Best practice would be salting and peppering them as well as picking a strong hashing function with as high a number of iterations as you can support. You would then pair that with 2FA (not SMS based), and a minimum password length of 16 with no maximum length.
Lots of older databases had fixed length fields, and you had to pad it if it was smaller. VARCHAR is a relatively new thing. So it's not just saving space, but that old databases tended to force the issue.
Nobody has an excuse today. Even Cobol has variable length strings.
- Don't truncate passwords for verification.
It needed to be said. Because some password system architects have been just that stupid.
Edit: Fear of other's stupidity is the mind killer. I will face my fear. My fear will wash over me, and when it has passed, only I will remain. Or I'll be dead in a car accident caused by an AI driver.
I've seen sites truncate when setting, but not on checking. So you set a password on a site with no stated limit, go to use said password, and get locked out. It's infuriating
Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn't, so the password didn't work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.
Sounds like my bank.
Banks usually have the absolute worst password policies. It's typically because their backend is some crusty mainframe from the 80s that limits inputs to something absurdly insecure by today's standards and they've kicked the upgrade can down the road for so long now that it's a staggeringly monumental task to rewrite it all. Thankfully most of them have upgraded at this point, but every now and then you still find one that's got ridiculous limits like a maximum password length of 8 and only alphanumeric characters (with no 2FA obviously).
Another ridiculous policy I've seen (many years ago) is logging in too fast. I used to get locked out of my banks website all the time and I used autotype with KeePass so I was baffled when it wouldn't get accepted. Eventually I had a thought to slow down the typing mechanism and suddenly I didn't get locked out anymore.
Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
This is a big one. Especially in corporate environments where most of the users are, shall we say, not tech savvy. Forcing people to comply with byzantine incomprehensible password composition rules plus incessantly insisting that they change their password every 7/14/30 days to a new inscrutable string that looks like somebody sneezed in punctuation marks accomplishes nothing other than enticing everyone to just write their password down on a Post-It and stick it to their monitor or under their keyboard.
Remember: Users do not care about passwords. From the perspective of anyone who isn't a programmer or a security expert, passwords are just yet another exasperating roadblock some nerd keeps putting in front of them that is preventing them from doing whatever it is they were actually trying to do.
NIST are bureaucrats sure, but bureaucrats with lots and lots of practical experience.
Only issue I see is that the 8 chars required is very short and easy to brute force. You would hope that people would go for the recommended instead, but doubt it.
I was expecting idiotic rules screaming "bureaucratic muppets don't know what they're legislating on", but instead what I'm seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible
NIST knows what they're doing. It's getting organizations to adapt that's hard. NIST has recommended against expiring passwords for like a decade already, for example, yet pretty much every IT dept still has passwords expiring at least once a year.
re #7, I hope they are also saying no 'secret questions' to reset the password?
I think so, based on the original: "Verifiers and CSPs [credential service providers] SHALL NOT permit the subscriber to store a hint that is accessible to an unauthenticated claimant." With "shall not" being used for hard prohibitions.
You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
Hmm. I wonder about this one. Different ways to encode the same character. Different ways to calculate the length. No obvious max byte size.
Who cares? It's going to be hashed anyway. If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash. If another user can't generate the same input, well, that's really rather the point. And I can't think of a single backend, language, or framework that doesn't treat a single Unicode character as one character. Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you're not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.
It matters for bcrypt/scrypt. They have a 72 byte limit. Not characters, bytes.
That said, I also think it doesn't matter much. Reasonable length passphrases that could be covered by the old Latin-1 charset can easily fit in that. If you're talking about KJC languages, then each character is actually a whole word, and you're packing a lot of entropy into one character. 72 bytes is already beyond what's needed for security; it's diminishing returns at that point.
If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash.
Yes, if. I don't know if you can guarantee that. It's all fun and games as long as you're doing English. In other languages, you get characters that can be encoded in more than 1 way. User at home has a localized keyboard with a dedicated key for such a character. User travels across the border and has a different language keyboard and uses a different way to create the character. Euro problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence
Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you’re not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.
There is always some son-of-a-removed who doesn’t get the word.
It's crazy that they didn't include all the "should" items in that list. If you read the entire section, there's a critical element that's missing in the list, which is that new passwords should be checked against blocklists. Otherwise, if you combine 1, 5, and 6, you end up with people using "password" as their password, and keeping that forever. Really, really poor organization on their part. I'm already fighting this at work.
I think it's pretty idiotic to
Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords.
They might mean well, but the reason we require a special character and number is to ensure the amount of possible characters are increased.
If a website doesn't enforce it, people are just going to do a password like password
password is a totally valid password under this rule. Any 8 letter word is valid. hopsital for example.
These passwords can be cracked in seconds under 10 minutes, and have their hashes checked for in leaks in no time if the salt is also exposed in the hack.
Edit: Below
Numbers from a calculator with 8 characters using sha2 (ignoring that crackers will try obvious fill ins like 0 for o and words before random characters, this is just for example)
hospital 5m 23s
Hospital 10m 47s
Hospita! 39m 12s
Moving beyond 8
Hospita!r - 19h 49m
Hospita!ro 3w 4d
Hospita!roo 2y 1m
Hospita!room 66 years
The suggestion of multiple random words makes not needing the characters but you have to enforce a longer limit then, not 8.
At least with 11 characters with upper case and special characters if it was all random you get about 2 years after a breach to do something instead of mere weeks. If it was 11 characters all lower case nothing special you'd only get 2 months and we are rarely notified that fast.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
What kind of barbarian puts a space in their password?
Very common for pass phrases, and not dissuaded. Pass phrases are good for people to remember without using poor storage practices (post it notes, txt file, etc) and are strong enough to keep secure against brute force attacks or just guessing based off knowledge of the user.
On one hand, that's true. On the other hand, a person should only need exactly one passphrase, which is the one used to unlock their password manager. Every other password should be randomly-generated and would only contain space characters by chance.
That's great in theory, but you'll have passwords for logging into OSes too which password managers do not help with and you better have it memorized or you're going to have a bad time.
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That's the "zero width space," Alt + 200B for Windows users. Another favorite of mine is the nonbreaking space, Alt + 0160, which a staggering majority of web sites and other systems fail to account for.
gosh who would want an uncommon character that obviously most average people aren’t thinking about in their passwords, that sounds like it might even be somewhat secure.
hunter 2
unhackable
My passphrase includes several spaces. It's another character to assist in entropy.
I'm with you, despite seeing lemmings downvote the heck out of your comment 😢
The reason, and specifically for whitespace at the beginning or end of a password, is that a lot of users copy-paste their passwords into the form, and for various reasons, whitespace can get pasted in, causing an invalid match. No bueno.
Source: I'm a web developer who has seen this enough times that we had to implement a whitespace-trim validation for both setting & entering passwords.
Trimming whitespace from the start and end of a password is fine but you absolutely should not remove whitespace from the middle of a password.