Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code. Did you immediately understand what it was doing? If not, you’re not alone – many software developers, including myself, find it challenging to grasp unfamiliar code quickly…
Why the password.trim()? Silently removing parts of the password can lead to dangerous bugs and tells me the developer didn’t peoperly consider how to sanitize input.
I remember once my password for a particular organization had a space at the end. I could log in to all LDAP-connected applications, except for one that would insist my password was wrong. A trim() or similar was likely the culprit.
Saving the password truncates but validation doesn’t. So it just fails every time you try to log in with no explanation. The number of times I have seen this in a production website is too damn high.
The password needs to be 8 letters long and may only contain the alphabet. Also we don’t tell you this requirement or tell you that setting the password went wrong. We just lock you out.
Why the
password.trim()? Silently removing parts of the password can lead to dangerous bugs and tells me the developer didn’t peoperly consider how to sanitize input.I remember once my password for a particular organization had a space at the end. I could log in to all LDAP-connected applications, except for one that would insist my password was wrong. A
trim()or similar was likely the culprit.Another favorite of mine is truncating the password to a certain length w/o informing the user.
Saving the password truncates but validation doesn’t. So it just fails every time you try to log in with no explanation. The number of times I have seen this in a production website is too damn high.
The password needs to be 8 letters long and may only contain the alphabet. Also we don’t tell you this requirement or tell you that setting the password went wrong. We just lock you out.
Thanks for the tip. password.trim() can indeed be problematic. I just removed that line.
The reason for leaving in the
password.trim()would be one of the few things that I would ever document with a comment.