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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Always a joy when your generated password is refused:

    694*C73&4:Ekp>fy>SE&o![RC

(This is an example of what password-store generates.)

Not good enough, because it's too long. Nothing throws you back ten years in time like having to handcraft a password to comply with all the silly rules.

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Not so long ago I had to register to a website allowing a comma (or was it a semicolon?) in a password during registration but refusing to login using said password. Fun times.

I once spent 15 minutes trying to register in a local Domino's website which kept bugging me about lack of a special character - even though I had one in it. Turned out to be that the app truncates the entered password after the first 20 characters and only considers the first part. Thankfully the special character was after the 20th position so I noticed the error and fixed it, but if it wasn't I'd be wondering the next time I'm logging in why it's not letting me login with a valid password.

You might not even have noticed if the login form truncated the input as well before hashing it. (You probably would have noticed after some update to their website removes the truncation though.)

Why do you need a secure account to order pizza?

How else are they going to run pepperoni-based big data analytics?

I've had the same problem with Verizon, in the past the password would only store the first 20 characters. Took me an hour or two to figure it out and fix the problem. I'm not sure if that's still the case, hopefully not.

My issue with Verizon is they lock an account after 3 bad attempts, and the "username" is the cell phone number for the account. Which seems to be slurped into some automated brute force engine.

Every single time I want to login, I have to do a password reset first. Makes me which I had the phone number to every manager in the company, so I could lock them all out every day.

Also, since having the phone is the only second factor for authentication, that's all you need to access an account.

Presumably it also truncates the password when doing sign-in?

Hm, yes. I had that happen with a '#'. Presumably there was some nasty evaluation going on and the rest of the password was treated as a comment.

I wonder why I never pursued that.

I've had that with work passwords - using my password generator I give them a 64-character gibberish mess, but it turns out that they only accept 16 characters, and I rendered my account useless until they could reset it for me. How frustrating.

You will usually get far better entropy by simply stitching together a random array of everyday words. Example: stitching better everyday words array entropy level. Anyway, as for the too-long problem, then I guess we're back to square one. :)

> Far better entropy

> random array of everyday words

No, that's not how entropy works. Random characters still score better.

Good try, but that doesn't apply to password managers. Several everyday words contain more bits than a garbled single word, but a string of dozens of truly random characters beat both.

You might be referring to https://xkcd.com/936/

That's the one! ^^ And you're of course correct.

Strings of everyday words are better than the passwords most people choose, they're memorable, and they're often good enough from a practical perspective. But if you're using a password manager and don't have to remember passwords, you might as well use truly random passwords, which have more entropy.

... for the same length. But length doesn't really matter unless you're manually typing it in, in which case many people will be faster at typing words than random characters.

I disagree. I use a 1Password, and I used to do the "totally random string of letters, symbols and digits", but I've dropped it for the "four or five random english words" alternative for all new passwords.

There are a couple of situations where having these symbol strings is really inconvenient. For instance, reading a password out loud to another person, or when logging in on a device where you can't (or don't want to) install your password manager on (e.g. a PS4 or an Apple TV). In those cases, "puncture-foible-irish-ducat-rejoice" is a lot easier to handle than "jh&6dQ#F]9.Z>u^t]6u+".

The "symbol" password has more entropy for sure, but the actual security benefit is essentially non-existent. No one's going to guess either password, and I'm never using the same password in two different places anyway. The extra convenience is totally worth it.

EDIT: as other people have pointed out in the thread, another example would be badly behaving sites that prevent "paste" or use other techniques to block password managers. Much easier to type in those words then.

> [...] you might as well use truly random passwords, which have more entropy.

At what point is more entropy simply diminishing returns? Five random words gives you 64 bits, and six gives you 77 bits (each word = 12.9 bites):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware * https://www.rempe.us/diceware/#eff

The primary benefit of Diceware over a "random" string of characters is that it is easy to remember and truly random. With a password manager you don't need to remember the password and it will be generated truly randomly. A string of 11 random alphanumeric charatcers has more entropy than a 5 word diceware passphrase with the added benefit that it is less to type if you need to do so manually. But diceware can be a good idea for creating the master password for your password manager and if you do that you should probably use a 10 word passphrase rather than 5.

For anyone keeping score at home, some handy-dandy tables with entropy per symbol:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength#Random_passw...

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