I wonder how much of this stems from two stupid IT policies. For decades users have been told to not write down passwords and to change them regularly. The result of this policy is to use a small number of password variations that one reuses. Then IT complaims about it.
The better plan has always been to use long random passwords that you never reuse and write them down by some method like a password manger and only change them rarely for example when they may be compromised,
My workplace has finally gone to passphrases and 1 year password life, which is nice as it’s a password I often need to type, so I’d rather 20 easy to type and memorise chars than 16 random
The missleading thing about passphrases is that anything a human can remember is low entropy. That it has 20 charachers says nothing about how random.
Edit: I also wonder how much randomness is really needed. Properly salted and hashed passwords shoud not need that much randomness. Lot of this is about users just choosing bad passwords, reusing, and IT not properly salting and hashingon their end.
Are you sure you can’t make a high entropy memorable password?
My scheme pulls four words at random from a large corpus
Just compare the number of possibilities. Number of words to the 4th power to 94 to the 15th power. Your corpus would have to be 25 million words. In contrast, there are about 800K words in the english language and about 1000 commonly used words.
I remember asking my company if they have official password management software in my job before my last job. They did not. I can’t believe we have all this specific software to be used at the company but they don’t put some time to identify what they want employees to use for this. Funny thing is security teams are such big deals but I think they actually don’t want to get involved in case it does not work out.
Lot of security is theater. IT doing a CYA thing.
I’m glad I’ve been using a password manager for several years now.
Yeah I think I’ve got 600 distinct logins in my bitwarden at this point, lol.
This is a great example of how impossible it is not write down usernmes and passwords and how infeasible forcing changes is.
The other thing people do not talk about enough is user names. They should be somewhat random too and not reused. Forcing people to use their email address is particularly stupid but very common.
Yep, before I switched to a password manager in college I had 3-4 passwords I would use across all accounts, and I would constantly need to recover accounts because I would forget the PW.
I actually don’t remember the last time I needed to recover an account. Having a password manager has been a massive time savings for me.
Always two there are. No more, no less. The one they know, and the one they don’t.