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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

For my own applications I typically require only three rules to be kept, two of which most users will never even encounter, the password must:

1. be long enough (e.g. 8 characters or more)

2. not be in the list of 10k most used passwords

3. not simply reuse words present in the username, email, birthday (if my application knows about it)

This keeps it open and only interferes with truly stupid (aka insecure) password choices.

Additionally I like to propose 8 passphrases to the user so they can choose one of their liking with one click (this also serves as a proposal what a good passphrase could look like).

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Good, except min 8 chars is not safe at all. Don't approach any semblance of security before min 12 chars. Min 14 is when you get into real security. The increase in entropy is exponential with password length, so security increases quickly after this.

The entropy doesn't increase exponentially if my password is just N copies of the same character or phrase, it only increases linearly.

Minimal password requirements allow people who know what they're doing to do the right thing. If you want to stop people who don't know what they're doing from doing the wrong thing, it will take a lot more than just length restrictions.

All that users do when they get hit with restrictions like that is repeat their password again, or fill it out with exclamation points. Not a lot of entropy getting added.

That is why I wrote e.g., actual length can be tuned to fit the purpose of the application. If there is really sensitive data or attackers gain privileges that could wreak havoc in the wrong hands I'd probably go with 12. If an attacker would gain next to nothing I'd go with 8 for comfort reasons.

This is in addition to other mechanisms of course, like rate limiting password attempts, fail2ban, salting, peppering, chosing the right hash, proper database separation etc.

The goal should be that only an attacker that has a copy of the database could profit from too short passwords, and only if they get the salt and pepper correct, to avoid rainbow-table-attacks.

I miss the old days of youtube when they had no restrictions. My password was x for ages. I think the only thing I use which still allows short passwords is my apple system password which thankfully is still three characters.

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