Why do so many companies and people say that your password has to be so long and complicated, just to have restrictions?

I am in the process of changing some passwords (I have peen pwnd and it’s the password I use for use-less-er sites) and suddenly they say “password may contain a maximum of 15 characters“… I mean, 15 is long but it’s nothing for a password manager.

And then there’s the problem with special characters like äàáâæãåā ñ ī o ė ß ÿ ç just to name a few, or some even won’t let you type a [space] in them. Why is that? Is it bad programming? Or just a symptom of copy-pasta?

  • MagicShel
    3·
    1 year ago

    It feels like a lot of sites are taking active measures to block the use is password managers, too. I hate those sites. Why I’m the hell would you do that???

      • jadero
        4·
        1 year ago

        Prairie Centre Credit Union.

        After years of complaining, they finally did something about their hopelessly insecure authentication, only to completely bork it.

        Bitwarden could open the site, but couldn’t push the login info. They prohibited pasting, so I had type everything by hand. And they couldn’t even get that prohibition right, because I discovered that I could type a character then CTRL+V to paste, then HOME, DEL.

        All of that is written past tense, because it was the last straw. I took my banking elsewhere, despite the fact I now have to drive 2.5 hours if I need to talk to someone in person.

      • MagicShel
        4·
        1 year ago

        Mainly financial sites, in my experience. I also have problems logging into Mastodon, because if I manually type my user and password I get logged in but if I use Bitwarden or even copy/paste it fails.

        But also every site where you type in the user name and then submit and it takes you to enter the password - I use a lot of custom emails to avoid spam so I may not remember my username for a given site, but Bitwarden won’t recognize it as a login page (much bigger problem on mobile, which is where I do most of my stuff).

        • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          It’s your browser. You can install JavaScript or a browser extension which disallows the no paste input field. So that you can always paste in.

          The financial institutions that implement that they’re trying to guard against local copy and paste password theft. Any program can have access to the clipboard. So I understand why they do it, and I understand why it’s annoying.

          For financial institutions I highly recommend using something like a Fido 2 key. I’m partial to the yubikey bioseries.