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posted by mrpg on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the gud1dea dept.

Schneier on Security:

NIST recently published their four-volume SP800-63-3 Digital Identity Guidelines. Among other things, they make three important suggestions when it comes to passwords:

-Stop it with the annoying password complexity rules. They make passwords harder to remember. They increase errors because artificially complex passwords are harder to type in. And they don't help that much. It's better to allow people to use pass phrases.

-Stop it with password expiration. That was an old idea for an old way we used computers. Today, don't make people change their passwords unless there's indication of compromise.

-Let people use password managers. This is how we deal with all the passwords we need.

These password rules were failed attempts to fix the user. Better we fix the security systems.

Does this mean we can stop composing our passwords like Q*bert?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by stretch611 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:53PM

    by stretch611 (6199) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:53PM (#580162)

    I remember back when I was using a system with 8 letter max passwords with forced changing every 30 days, 1 upper, 1 lower and 1 number all required. It was a mess. To get around it, I would use the 3 letter abbreviation for the month followed by the 4 digit year... Mar2005 Apr2005 May2005. (8 digit max, I think the min was 5 or 6)

    This is the exact reason why forced password changing is a bad idea.

    for the record... I use KeePassX [keepassx.org] now. It is protected with both a private key file and long passphrase.

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
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