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> Is there any valid reason for this?

If they know that at some point they'll have to ask you to enter your password over a restricted input-method (e.g. on a DTMF keypad.)

Real world example of this "limited input" problem: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202143/i-included-e...

Pre-Touch Bar, of course...

Yep. FastMail restricts spaces in passwords due to mail clients that do not allow them.

Which clients specifically?

(FastMail developer here)

The issue was actually that we support many different protocols (not just mail) and some combinations of clients/protocols have had issues in the past (it might have been some FTP clients I think, but can't remember right now.)

Anyway, this restriction no longer applies as we now require server-generated app passwords for 3rd party apps: https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/apppassword.html. So feel free to use as many spaces as you like in your password!

I didn't know that, thanks, and thanks for providing a product I can rely on!

My suggestion: use a nonsense answer and use it for all of them. I don't reuse passwords but for exactly the reasons you state the answer to all my security challenges is something like "Because a kipper doesn't red the blue."

Alternately have a few nonsense phrases for stock challenge questions (first car, first pet, favorite <thing>, etc.) It's better than using the real (googleable) answer.

Finally, as Dale Carnegie would have loved: the more absurd it is the easier it is to remember. So while you won't remember if your favorite movie is the matrix or titanic, but you WOULD remember "I clocked blithely cookie everywhere." as the answer when you see that question.

Pafwert [1] creates the absurd really well.

[1] https://github.com/m8urnett/pafwert

Here's what I use to generate answers to secret questions:

    < /dev/urandom tr -dc a-z0-9 | head -c 16

This leads to things like:

> "What is your first pet's name?"

"q1ry9nftmxb1gmag"

I haven't had it happen yet, but I wonder what a customer service rep's response will be when I spell out "yrlmduihhyju5il0" when asked what my favorite color is.

The guy on the phone laughed. I've moved to providing a few random words, easier to say over the phone than capital y lowercase r number 1.... etc.

The woman on the phone at the utility company that was messing me around didn't laugh when I said the answer to my security question "what do you think of customer service" was "f*cking retards" :-D

Who even makes that a security question? I mean seriously. You might as well ask "What is your opinion on the color yellow?"

"What is your opinion of cargo cult infosec practices, specifically security questions?"

Going to guess they wrote it themselves in this case.

Be careful with it. Was dealing with credit card stuff (raising limit to go on travel) and when they were verifying my identity the policy was evidently to combine my questions with a "background check"

Said background check basically being they googled my name.

Which you would think isn't a problem until you get to "What school did you graduate from?" and have to go through four levels of reps to explain that (not actually what I typed) "Omelette Du Fromage" was my way of making it harder to social engineer my account.

I just use the security questions as another password, like my favorite color is JyQ|l[Duc-I6KrU-0k and I went to elementary school at ?YfBW+Yurh@m$lml":.

Those are rough when a customer service rep asks you for one of those over the phone... :)

I was literally just about to post this. I refuse to make my password less secure though - and security questions really are just "alternate passwords".

I've never had a problem but I have had a few reps who are trying to not act really surprised. I've had one instance of someone trying to stifle laughter (of the "You can't be serious") kind. Taking security seriously is a rare thing. :(

They usually stop me after the 8th or so character. I'd be concerned but if any potential social engineer has the first 8 characters they likely have the full string anyways so stopping early makes both our jobs easier.

On several social engineering calls I've had reps who were happy with just "it's just a bunch of random characters, would be a little silly if I tried to read it out"

Wow, that's disturbing.

Perhaps I should say that my first pet's name was "mellower retry audited grieves" rather than "esrhciaiyzhkj". (Both are random, and both have very close to the same information content given the dictionary I used.)

I do this. I told the CS rep that my password hint was "just random characters mashed on the keyboard" and she accepted this and moved on. I'm not sure what to think of the security implications.

That's what you get when the reps can see the answers. The only working solution is to have the reps "log in" to the users account by entering the security question answer.

If the reps can see the answer, it's far too easy for the attacker to turn the verification process into a game of twenty questions.

I've had this before with my bank, when I've had to authorise a large card payment (for a car). I was asked various security questions about monthly recurring payments from my account (in the UK, so standing orders and direct debits), but I've so many I can't keep up, and I change savings accounts and health, car, home, pet insurer every year to get a good deal.

The rep on the phone kept prompting me when I was unsure. She'd mention an amount, then when I was unsure they'd say something like, "maybe it's for your mortgage...? Maybe the company begins with the letter 'N'?"

It was all a bit silly, security theater at its finest.

I had the opposite recently. Trying to log into my alma mater's website to get a copy of transcripts, but my account had long ago locked out. They asked me questions over the phone to reset it, but I couldn't answer any of them.

"What is your phone number on file?" Shoot, I don't know, it was an old number that I changed maybe 6 years ago...

"What is your address on file?" I've moved maybe five times since then? I tried "was it in another state?" to narrow it down, but the answer was "I can't say that".

"Okay, we can verify you by classes you took..." Great, now we're getting somewhere! I took Intro to Ethics. "We need to know what term." Okay, this is tricky, it was like 10 years ago... Fall of 2006? "We need to know professor's name." Um. I think I have the book here, I know he wrote it... Professor McLaughlin? "I also need to know the day of the week the class was held and what time the class was."

Are you effing kidding me? I wish I was joking. I ended up just calling my old advisor and he "verified" me with an email to the helpdesk.

I've found that the only known repository of all my previous addresses is Amazon. I really need to capture them to 1Password.

Pull a free credit report--you get one per year by law. It should have all your past addresses on it, or at least within the last X years.

As bad as it probably is, I've kept it in google sheets going back a few years now...

Replying to sibling.

Worse, if reps can see the answer, then this is equivalent to not hashing the passwords at all since you have a password-equivalent stored in plaintext.

FYI, if you click on the <x> minutes ago link above the post you can get a reply box even on new posts.

When I worked for t-mobile it was last 4 of the social unless the customer requests otherwise.

Few requested otherwise, and usually it was because they were annoyed about people being able to see part of their SSN.

>> they were annoyed about people being able to see part of their SSN

Part of? I worked for AT&T back when they merged with Cingular. We only asked for the last 4 over the phone, but the entire 9-digit SSN was shown in the app. Every single low-level employee had (has?) the entire SSN in front of them. Never dared tell a customer that little fact when they made a fuss over my having access to their last 4.

Many password managers have a setting to make a password pronounceable, which is perfect for this use case.

Some systems allow entering your own security question and answer, in which case my security question is always "What's the other password?".

There are some companies that make you choose from a list of answers too. United Airlines is one.

> When I see that I can use any symbol from '%!#&' or whatever list they provide, I can only imagine it's a really naive SQL-injection defense. Is there any valid reason for this?

One reason I've seen for this is that the website is just a front-end for some older mainframe system that has password rules from 1987. Banks and insurance companies are frequently culprits here.

They should have required proper guiding when creating a new password. I normally use passwords that are like 80 characters long, generated in a password manager. If I paste one of these in a password field, then submit, I get the warning that it's too long. Why didn't it say so when I pasted it? Why put a limit on it below 256 characters? Does that really matter nowadays? It's not a 5MB selfie I'm uploading.

The limitions of the password should be built in the HTML of the form like a regex or something easier.

I usually have fun with security challenges. And get annoyed at ones with multiple choice answers.

What's your favorite movie? -> a sexual position

Where did you go to high school? -> another sexual position

City of birth? -> something else from the kamasutra

Of course, that makes phone conversations where they ask you those security questions very fun.

Apparently, sexually explicit concepts (maybe all 'shocking' concepts?) are very highly memorable, so that's probably a good approach!

" I know Google is planning on dinging sites that don't use HTTPS, is it possible they could ding sites for poor password policies?"

How they gonna do that? Do you expect Google to audit every site in their search ranks?

The same way to index websites: with web-spiders. They would need to write new code for this though. Also for HTTPS they also had to write new code.

How do you check if password is salted and hashed correctly afterwards? There's not much use of strong passwords if they are stored in plaintext anyway.

Couldn't Google just auto-register an account with a known good password, and penalise the account if it fails? Someone else mentioned improving the http authentication 'api', which would definitely help in this regard; until then there are drawbacks to the auto-register approach including things like captchas. Sites would have to explicitly allow the Google bot to bypass them.