Hacker News Reader

Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

Expiring passwords are one of my biggest gripes, and I still see them everywhere

Expiring passwords and length limits. Why can't my password be a 5KB long? My password manager has no limits. Are people storing them in plain text in 2026?

I wouldn’t trust enterprise internet security boxes to not trip on such long text fields.

And content limits. Why can't my password contain the % character? No special characters? What makes a character "special"? Why can't it contain emoji? So many password systems go to great lengths to remove potential entropy and randomness from passwords with their rules. The usual excuse is "blah blah blah legacy systems" which is not a good reason.

Personally, I wouldn't use anything beyond ASCII in a password. I don't want encoding bugs to lock me out of my encrypted partition or bank account, thank you very much.

Probably because there is some mildly decent reason (or very good, I don't know) to avoid them and it really doesn't matter enough to worry about getting around it.

Why would you want emojis in your password? It's a piece of text not meant to be seen, emojis are meant to be seen. Just randomly generate some characters and get on with your life. I don't understand why you care about this at all, it's such a pointless thing to complain about.

To me it signals bad engineering in the underlying system which doesn’t exactly encourage trusting the system with my data.

I think simplicity is good engineering. Bending over backwards to support pointless usecases isn't good engineering. Almost nobody would use this and the ones who would don't need to. Why put in the effort?

I agree, content limits are a royal PITA. Do you know how long I had to search to find a password manager that would accept my password with its doodles, sign language, and squirrel noises?

I ran into a website for work that would let you create a long password, but silently truncate it to 12 characters before saving. Mind boggling.

This is the best. Especially when the password is being autotyped by the pw manager and so you never see the truncation and now have a bad pw saved in your manager. Alongside a restrictive password policy with no ui explaining what the policy is.

This happens on some HP printers too, the web interface lets you happily enter lengthy passwords, but doesn't bother telling you it truncated the entry at 16 or 12 characters.

Blizzard/battle.net used to do this (still does?), lol

I unfortunately had the infuriating experience dealing with a (government, of course) site that did this. To add to the experience, not only did it silently truncate at registration, but it did NOT truncate on the login fields. And of course, it has a lockout after several failed attempts. UX gore at it's finest.

Happened to me a few times. And then your password never works and you can’t understand why.

> Why can't my password be a 5KB long?

Probably because that's just unnecessary. A few dozen characters is plenty, anything beyond that is just excessive.

> Why can't my password be a 5KB long?

You should switch to Windows, Microsoft got you covered[1].

[1]: https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Arch...

Never seen that bug before, thats a dozy!

Unbounded length anything is a denial of service vector, even if they do hash. I can assure you that even if your password manager doesn't impose limits, you can most certainly hit some if you try hard enough. It is also completely pointless. Two dozen or so ASCII letters and numerals will let you encode all the entropy you could possibly want.

Expiration is self-evident. Long lived tokens you can just whip around will whip around. The number one group of people who are hurt by expiration are those not using a password manager anyways. Autogenerated and autofilled passwords can expire all they want, it's a non-issue.

Special characters are dumb and unnecessary. They also pose a fun challenge when you happen to run into a situation where you can't input them anymore all of a sudden.

People cannot participate in cryptographic schemes, only machines can. These gimmicks do not help fix that. It's "theatre", as they say.

Good security policies should have an upper bound on password length, but also those upper bounds should maybe be like 100 characters or so. There's a couple reasons for this. First being is that hashing does take some compute resources, second being that there is some security/usability tradeoffs here, etc, and third being that after like 30 characters or so, the effective (key phrase here) security gains become marginal.

> Why can't my password be a 5KB long

Because that opens you up to an entirely new class of attack. You have to set the limit somewhere and if you set it at INT_MAX, then a malicious user could find a O(n^2) path in your password validator and input a 4GB password that locks up the machine. Or they could create 1000 users in a row with 4GB passwords and fill up your storage.

> Or they could create 1000 users in a row with 4GB passwords and fill up your storage.

Not an issue if you’re storing passwords properly. You don’t store the actual password, you store a (hopefully) salted hash of it.

Due to corporate IT working its fingers into everything vaguely computer related, I now have to annually change the passwords that operators use to log onto the HMIs on my OT network (which has no connection to the greater Internet.)

That means I now get calls after hours for a couple weeks (allowing for all shifts to cycle through) from operators who are locked out of their ops stations. I can't send the password via email, obviously, and word-of-mouth is inconsistent at best. So I'm left with the sticky note under the keyboard or stuck to the monitor, which the operators won't read anyway.

My company does it to our phone passcodes. 90 days.

Well, I’ve only got 10 fingers, so looks like my time there would be limited to 900 days.

I worked some (terrible) place that did that and wouldn’t allow you to use your last 3 passwords. So what we were doing is that when it was time to rotate password, we would change our password 3 times in a row and on the fourth time we would just use the same password as before. This way our password never changed (the requirements for passwords were ridiculous) and the box could be checked in the audit.

Also the same company: we ran a version of our artifact repository that had a 10.0 CVE for almost a year. It was too much work to update it, couldn’t spare the resources.

One good thing about expiring passwords is that it forces you to use something that you probably don't use for everything else in your personal life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com