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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Nope, direct account with USAA. I wonder if the way the user/pass is entered into the field, that it doesn't trip the check for length? I don't manually copy/paste, and also use autofill for initial setup/changing credentials. I've seen it before on other websites but it usually truncates on the login auth and yells at me.
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I just tried it, actually - sonofabitch. It (the change password flow) took the password via pw mgr, (apparently) truncated it, accepted it; this was a while ago but I remember the process. Just now, the login flow takes my username, password, truncates it (50+ chars, 13, or 12, doesn't matter), accepts it. 11 chars throws an 'incorrect login' message, so I don't have a borked account. At no point has it ever complained about password length. Jesus christ.
Absolutely beautiful. What a company, lol.
The real beauty of it is that I can't fathom the logic. Unless they're storing the passwords as plaintext, it's not like it can be a storage issue. The hashes will be a constant size. I guess it takes longer to hash bigger inputs, but like, that difference should be unnoticeable until thousands of characters.
Did the engineer who made it truly not fathom that people might have passwords longer than 12 characters? That's the kind of mid-90s logic that makes me genuinely worry that the passwords aren't hashed on the backend, or are just MD5'd or something...
Makes absolutely no sense at all.