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NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Amicitas@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Here is the text of the NIST sp800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines.

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 335 points 2 months ago (76 children)

Reworded rules for clarity:

Min required length must be 8 chars (obligatory), but it should be 15 chars (recommended).

Max length should allow at least 64 chars.

You should accept all ASCII plus space.

You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.

Don't demand composition rules (e.g. "u're password requires a comma! lol lmao haha" tier idiocy)

Don't bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there's evidence of compromise.

Don't store password hints that others can guess.

Don't prompt the user to use knowledge-based authentication.

Don't truncate passwords for verification.

I was expecting idiotic rules screaming "bureaucratic muppets don't know what they're legislating on", but instead what I'm seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible.

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.

Hmm. I wonder about this one. Different ways to encode the same character. Different ways to calculate the length. No obvious max byte size.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Who cares? It's going to be hashed anyway. If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash. If another user can't generate the same input, well, that's really rather the point. And I can't think of a single backend, language, or framework that doesn't treat a single Unicode character as one character. Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you're not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 5 points 2 months ago

It matters for bcrypt/scrypt. They have a 72 byte limit. Not characters, bytes.

That said, I also think it doesn't matter much. Reasonable length passphrases that could be covered by the old Latin-1 charset can easily fit in that. If you're talking about KJC languages, then each character is actually a whole word, and you're packing a lot of entropy into one character. 72 bytes is already beyond what's needed for security; it's diminishing returns at that point.

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