Can we get rid of the password expiration too? Requiring that users change their perfectly secure password every 6 months is absurd and gives the impression of security when in reality it only makes things worse.
At this point — barring edge cases of operating in geographies where regulations haven’t caught up — it’s just inertia, aka “inaction doesn’t get you fired (usually)”.
Someone in management took the application form and justified their own belief on security and two of those three companies still tell staff "it's because of our insurerer" even after given the facts.
I keep a long list of strong passwords and some 50 pins in my head, at least I think I do.
I know a guy who regularly gets locked out of things. It's a terrifying process. Everything unravels.
My employer requires I change my laptop password every 60 days, it stores the last 2 years of passwords to prevent reuse.
I am not opening up LastPass and plugging in a 32 character random string every time I want to start my computer up. My password at any given point is either a few random words and a number, or a short (8-12 character) alphanumeric string without symbols. But you know what it always is? On a post-it note stuck to the inside of my laptop.
My employer is consciously choosing to make my laptop less secure because the CISO is an idiot.
Obviously, this is a terrible idea.
So not only could you implement your idea - you could also tell people you "log in with a yubikey" and they'll think you're at the forefront of security.
Failing to recognize and channel human behavior into positive behaviors and outcomes does suggest a level of ignorance/arrogance outside of extreme situations.
There’s probably a type of data one might handle to justify physical access threat models, but incompetence and out of date knowledge from these types is far more likely. FWIW something like a third to half of CISO’s are from nontechnical management backgrounds, based on surveys I’ve seen.
1Password is smart enough to let me have a secure, non-leaked password of high complexity that I have memorized, then let me go years without resetting it. I started there and the policies have made my laptop progressively less secure over time.
If people have to resort to sticky notes, sharing credentials, scripts that automatically update a file containing a plaintext credential, or what have you, odds are that security has massively fumbled the ball.
Keep in mind this is already intuitive enough for everyone, even the security minded, within some set of social and or professional norms. No one uses one time pads for common password based authentications, nor do they rotate passwords daily, nor do they require 64+ characters. We don't do this because its obvious to everyone that business would be too great, and people simply would not comply. Many security teams seem interested in pushing that boundary as far as they can without regard to what the probability density function of compliance actually looks like.
I say this as my password for Nationwide Children's Hospital has officially become the first password to cross that line for me, and now lives in a paper notebook. Forced reset, 2FA mandated, requiring 15 characters, upper, lower, number, and special char (but only a subset of special chars).
Maybe its overkill that the place I go to fill out questionnaires about baby poop, has minimum password requirements such that the entire world's computer would take over 10,000 years to crack.
How do these people get these jobs?
I have 25 years of enterprise-level web application development experience. I passed the CISSP on my first try with minimal study. I read RFCs for fun.
And yet I can't even get a screening interview with an actual human (although my one AI interview asked surprisingly competent follow-up questions).
Relationships.
> Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.
8 years later, no one seems to care. Other things that the NIST doesn't recommend is rules such as "letters + numbers + special characters". What it does recommend is checking for known weak passwords, such as passwords that are present in dictionaries and leaks or relate to the user name.
Here is the relevant document: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html