Last week, I tried to register for a service and was really surprised by a password limit of 16 characters. Why on earth yould you impose such strict limits? Never heard of correct horse battery staple?
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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This is my biggest pet peeve. Password policies are largely mired in inaccurate conventional wisdom, even though we have good guidance docs from NIST on this.
Frustrating poor policy configs aside, this max length is a huge red flag, basically they are admitting that they store your password in plan text and aren’t hashing like they should be.
If a company tells you your password has a maximum length, they are untrustable with anything important.
"If a company tells you your password has a maximum length..."
Uhhh no. Not at all. What so ever. Period. Many have a limit for technical reasons because hashing passwords expands their character count greatly. Many websites store their passwords in specific database columns that themselves have a limit that the hashing algorithm quickly expands passwords out to.
If you plan your DB schema with a column limit in mind for fast processing, some limits produce effectively shorter password limits than you might expect. EVERYONE has column limits at least to prevent attacks via huge passwords, so a limit on a password can be a good sign they're doing things correctly and aren't going to be DDOS'd via login calls that can easily crush CPUs of nonspecialized servers.
Can you not simply have a hashing algorithm that results in a fixed length hash?
That would be all of them, yes.