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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:25AM
That's my own practice. I am wary of giving true answers, because the true answers to some of those questions could be discovered by an attacker and because there's a tendency for various sites to use the same security questions. If one gives true answers, and one site is compromised, then the attacker has the answers for all sites that used the same question(s).